Helper thread prefetching for loosely-coupled multiprocessor systems

  • Authors:

  • Changhee Jung;Daeseob Lim;Jaejin Lee;Yan Solihin

  • Affiliations:

  • Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA;School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

  • Venue:
  • IPDPS'06 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Parallel and distributed processing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This paper presents a helper thread prefetching scheme that is designed to work on loosely-coupled processors, such as in a standard chip multiprocessor (CMP) system or an intelligent memory system. Loosely-coupled processors have an advantage in that fine-grain resources, such as processor and L1 cache resources, are not contended by the application and helper threads, hence preserving the speed of the application. However, interprocessor communication is expensive in such a system. We present techniques to alleviate this. Our approach exploits large loop-based code regions and is based on a new synchronization mechanism between the application and helper threads. This mechanism precisely controls how far ahead the execution of the helper thread can be with respect to the application thread. We found that this is important in ensuring prefetching timeliness and avoiding cache pollution. To demonstrate that prefetching in a loosely-coupled system can be done effectively, we evaluate our prefetching in a standard, unmodified CMP system, and in an intelligent memory system where a simple processor in memory executes the helper thread. Evaluating our scheme with nine memory-intensive applications with the memory processor in DRAM achieves an average speedup of 1.25. Moreover, our scheme works well in combination with a conventional processorside sequential L1 prefetcher, resulting in an average speedup of 1.31. In a standard CMP, the scheme achieves an average speedup of 1.33.