Abstract
Software cache has been showed as a robust approach in multi-core systems with no hardware support for transparent data transfers between local and global memories. Software cache provides the user with a transparent view of the memory architecture and considerably improves the programmability of such systems. But this software approach can suffer from poor performance due to considerable overheads related to software mechanisms to maintain the memory consistency. This paper presents a set of alternatives to smooth their impact. A specific write-back mechanism is introduced based on some degree of speculation regarding the number of threads actually modifying the same cache lines. A case study based on the Cell BE processor is described. Performance evaluation indicates that improvements due to the optimized software-cache structures combined with the proposed code-optimizations translate into 20% up to 40% speedup factors, compared to a traditional software cache approach.
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Vujic, N., Alvarez, L., Tallada, M.G., Martorell, X., Ayguadé, E. (2010). Adaptive and Speculative Memory Consistency Support for Multi-core Architectures with On-Chip Local Memories. In: Gao, G.R., Pollock, L.L., Cavazos, J., Li, X. (eds) Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing. LCPC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5898. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13374-9_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13374-9_15
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