“Software Assists to On-chip Memory Hierarchy of Manycore Embedded Systems”

Title: “Software Assists to On-chip Memory Hierarchy of Manycore Embedded Systems”
Speaker: Majid Namaki Shoushtari, University of California, Irvine

Date and Time: Tuesday, November 7, 2017 at 11:00AM-12:00PM

Location: Donald Bren Hall 2011

Abstract:
The growing computing demands of emerging application domains such as Recognition/Mining/Synthesis (RMS), visual computing, wearable devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) has driven the move towards manycore architectures to better manage tradeoffs among performance, energy efficiency, and reliability.
The memory hierarchy of manycore architectures has a major impact on their overall performance, energy efficiency and reliability. We identify three major problems that make traditional memory hierarchies unattractive for manycore architectures and their data-intensive workloads: (1) they are power hungry and not a good fit for manycores in face of dark silicon, (2) they are not adaptable to the variable workload’s requirements and memory behavior, and (3) they are not scalable due to coherence overheads.

This thesis argues that many of these inefficiencies are the result of software-agnostic hardware-managed memory hierarchies. Application semantics and behavior captured in software can be exploited to more efficiently manage the memory hierarchy. This thesis exploits some of this information and proposes a number of techniques to mitigate the aforementioned inefficiencies in two broad contexts: (1) explicit management of hybrid cache-SPM memory hierarchy, and (2) exploiting approximate computing to improve the energy efficiency of the memory hierarchy.
We first present the required hardware and software support for a software-assisted memory hierarchy that is composed of distributed memories which can be partitioned between caches and SPMs at runtime. We discuss our SPM APIs, the protocol needed for data movements, and our approach for explicit management of shared data.
Next, we augment caches and SPMs in this hierarchy with approximation support in order to improve the energy efficiency of the memory subsystem when running approximate programs.
Finally, we discuss a quality-configurable memory approximation strategy using formal control theory that adjusts the level of approximation at runtime depending on the desired quality for the program’s output.