Deriving Efficient Data Movement from Decoupled Access/Execute Specifications

  • Authors:
  • Lee W. Howes;Anton Lokhmotov;Alastair F. Donaldson;Paul H. Kelly

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK SW7 2AZ;Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK SW7 2AZ;Codeplay Software, Edinburgh, UK EH1 3HP;Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK SW7 2AZ

  • Venue:
  • HiPEAC '09 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

On multi-core architectures with software-managed memories, effectively orchestrating data movement is essential to performance, but is tedious and error-prone. In this paper we show that when the programmer can explicitly specify both the memory access pattern and the execution schedule of a computation kernel, the compiler or run-time system can derive efficient data movement, even if analysis of kernel code is difficult or impossible. We have developed a framework of C++ classes for decoupled Access/Execute specifications, allowing for automatic communication optimisations such as software pipelining and data reuse. We demonstrate the ease and efficiency of programming the Cell Broadband Engine architecture using these classes by implementing a set of benchmarks, which exhibit data reuse and non-affine access functions, and by comparing these implementations against alternative implementations, which use hand-written DMA transfers and software-based caching.