Optimizing off-chip accesses in multicores

Abstract

In a network-on-chip (NoC) based manycore architecture, an off-chip data access (main memory access) needs to travel through the on-chip network, spending considerable amount of time within the chip (in addition to the memory access latency). In addition, it contends with on-chip (cache) accesses as both use the same NoC resources. In this paper, focusing on data-parallel, multithreaded applications, we propose a compiler-based off-chip data access localization strategy, which places data elements in the memory space such that an off-chip access traverses a minimum number of links (hops) to reach the memory controller that handles this access. This brings three main benefits. First, the network latency of off-chip accesses gets reduced; second, the network latency of on-chip accesses gets reduced; and finally, the memory latency of off-chip accesses improves, due to reduced queue latencies. We present an experimental evaluation of our optimization strategy using a set of 13 multithreaded application programs under both private and shared last-level caches. The results collected emphasize the importance of optimizing the off-chip data accesses.