A Memory Controller for Improved Performance of Streamed Computations on Symmetric Multiprocessors

  • Authors:
  • Sally A. McKee;William A. Wulf

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • IPPS '96 Proceedings of the 10th International Parallel Processing Symposium
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

The growing disparity between processor and memory speeds has caused memory bandwidth to become the performance bottleneck for many applications. In particular, this performance gap severely impacts stream-orientated computations such as (de)compression, encryption, and scientific vector processing. This paper describes the development of an intelligent memory interface that can exploit compiler-provided information on streamed memory access patterns to improve memory bandwidth. Simulation results show that such shared-memory multiprocessor systems can deliver nearly the full attainable bandwidth with relatively modest hardware costs.