Way Stealing: Cache-assisted Automatic Instruction Set Extensions

Philip Brisk, Edoardo Charbon, Paolo Ienne, Ties Jan Henderikus Kluter
Ieee Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Po Box 1331, Piscataway, Nj 08855-1331 Usa, 2009
Conference paper

This paper introduces Way Stealing, a simple architectural modification to a cache-based processor to increase data bandwidth to and from application-specific Instruction Set Extensions (ISEs). Way Stealing provides more bandwidth to the ISE-logic than the register file alone and does not require expensive coherence protocols, as it does not add memory elements to the processor. When enhanced with Way Stealing, ISE identification flows detect more opportunities for acceleration than prior methods; consequently, Way Stealing can accelerate applications to up to 3.7x, whilst reducing the memory sub-system energy consumption by up to 67%, despite data-cache related restrictions.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts

Related publications

Philip Brisk, Edoardo Charbon, Paolo Ienne, Ties Jan Henderikus Kluter
Ieee Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Po Box 1331, Piscataway, Nj 08855-1331 Usa, 2009
Conference paper

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/158885?ln=en

About this result

Related concepts (4)

Related concepts

Related publications (2)

Related publications

Way Stealing: A Unified Data Cache and Architecturally Visible Storage for Instruction Set Extensions

Philip Brisk, Edoardo Charbon, Paolo Ienne, Ties Jan Henderikus Kluter

Way Stealing is a simple architectural modification to a cache-based processor that increases the data bandwidth to and from application-specific instruction set extensions (ISEs), which increase performance and reduce energy consumption. Way Stealing offers higher bandwidth than interfacing the ISEs the processor's register file, and eliminates the need to allocate separate memories called architecturally visible storage (AVS) that are dedicated to the ISEs, and to ensure coherence between the AVS memories and the processor's data cache. Our results show that Way Stealing is competitive in terms of performance and energy consumption with other techniques that use AVS memories in conjunction with a data cache.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2014

LTRF: Enabling High-Capacity Register Files for GPUs via Hardware/Software Cooperative Register Prefetching

Mario Paulo Drumond Lages De Oliveira, Seyed Borna Ehsani, Babak Falsafi, Hamid Sarbazi-Azad

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) employ large register files to accommodate all active threads and accelerate context switching. Unfortunately, register files are a scalability bottleneck for future GPUs due to long access latency, high power consumption, and large silicon area provisioning. Prior work proposes hierarchical register file, to reduce the register file power consumption by caching registers in a smaller register file cache. Unfortunately, this approach does not improve register access latency due to the low hit rate in the register file cache. In this paper, we propose the Latency-Tolerant Register File (LTRF) architecture to achieve low latency in a two-level hierarchical structure while keeping power consumption low. We observe that compile-time interval analysis enables us to divide GPU program execution into intervals with an accurate estimate of a warp’s aggregate register working-set within each interval. The key idea of LTRF is to prefetch the estimated register working-set from the main register file to the register file cache under software control, at the beginning of each interval, and overlap the prefetch latency with the execution of other warps. Our experimental results show that LTRF enables high-capacity yet long-latency main GPU register files, paving the way for various optimizations. As an example optimization, we implement the main register file with emerging high-density high-latency memory technologies, enabling 8× larger capacity and improving overall GPU performance by 31% while reducing register file power consumption by 46%.

2018

A register file is an array of processor registers in a central processing unit (CPU). Register banking is the method of using a single name to access multiple different physical registers depending

Processor register

A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware

CPU cache

A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster m