An automatic code overlaying technique for multicores with explicitly-managed memory hierarchies

  • Authors:

  • Choonki Jang;Jun Lee;Sangmin Seo;Jaejin Lee

  • Affiliations:

  • Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Samsung Electronics, Yongin, Korea;Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea;Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea;Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The explicitly-managed memory hierarchies, where a hierarchy of distinct memories is exposed to the programmer and managed explicitly by software, are not only found in typical embedded processors but also found in a class of high performance multicore architectures. Code overlay techniques have been widely used to execute a program whose code is bigger than the available code memory in the system. To generate an efficient overlaid executable with maximum storage savings as well as minimum performance overhead, the overlay structure should be designed carefully. In this paper, we propose an efficient code overlay technique that automatically generates an overlay structure for a given memory size for multicores with explicitly-managed memory hierarchies. We observe that finding an efficient overlay structure with minimum memory copying and run-time check overhead is similar to the problem that finds a code placement with minimum conflict misses in the instruction cache. Our algorithm exploits the temporal-ordering information between functions during program execution. The information is obtained from profiling the program. Experimental results with 11 parallel applications on the Cell BE processor indicate that our approach is effective and promising.