A software-only scheme for managing heap data on limited local memory(LLM) multicore processors

Abstract

This article presents a scheme for managing heap data in the local memory present in each core of a limited local memory (LLM) multicore architecture. Although managing heap data semi-automatically with software cache is feasible, it may require modifications of other thread codes. Crossthread modifications are very difficult to code and debug, and will become more complex and challenging as we increase the number of cores. In this article, we propose an intuitive programming interface, which is an automatic and scalable scheme for heap data management. Besides, for embedded applications, where the maximum heap size can be profiled, we propose several optimizations on our heap management to significantly decrease the library overheads. Our experiments on several benchmarks from MiBench executing on the Sony Playstation 3 show that our scheme is natural to use, and if we know the maximum size of heap data, our optimizations can improve application performance by an average of 14%.