Challenges in Building a Flat-Bandwidth Memory Hierarchy for a Large-Scale Computer with Proximity Communication

  • Authors:
  • Robert Drost;Craig Forrest;Bruce Guenin;Ron Ho;Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy;Danny Cohen;John E. Cunningham;Bernard Tourancheau;Arthur Zingher;Alex Chow;Gary Lauterbach;Ivan Sutherland

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • HOTI '05 Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on High Performance Interconnects
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Memory systems for conventional large-scale computers provide only limited bytes/s of data bandwidth when compared to their flop/s of instruction execution rate. The resulting bottleneck limits the bytes/flop that a processor may access from the full memory footprint of a machine and can hinder overall performance. This paper discusses physical and functional views of memory hierarchies and examines existing ratios of bandwidth to execution rate versus memory capacity (or bytes/flop versus capacity) found in a number of large-scale computers. The paper then explores a set of technologies, Proximity Communication, low-power on-chip networks, dense optical communication, and Sea-of-Anything interconnect, that can flatten this bandwidth hierarchy to relieve the memory bottleneck in a large-scale computer that we call "Hero."