Multi-core optimization for conjugate gradient benchmark on heterogeneous processors

Developing parallel applications on heterogeneous processors is facing the challenges of 'memory wall',due to limited capacity of local storage,limited bandwidth and long latency for memory access. Aiming at this problem,a parallelization approach was proposed with six memory optimization schemes for CG,four schemes of them aiming at all kinds of sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SPMV) operation. Conducted on IBM QS20,the parallelization approach can reach up to 21 and 133 times speedups with size A and B,respectively,compared with single power processor element. Finally,the conclusion is drawn that the peak bandwidth of memory access on Cell BE can be obtained in SPMV,simple computation is more efficient on heterogeneous processors and loop-unrolling can hide local storage access latency while executing scalar operation on SIMD cores.

Parallel Processing Design for LTE PUSCH Demodulation and Decoding Based on Multi-Core Processor

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) system imposes high requirements for dispatching delay.Moreover,very large air interface rate of LTE requires good processing capability for the devices processing the baseband signals.Consequently,the single-core processor cannot meet the requirements of LTE system.This paper analyzes how to use multi-core processors to achieve parallel processing of uplink demodulation and decoding in LTE systems and designs an approach to parallel processing.The test results prove that this approach works quite well.

Shared Cache Based on Content Addressable Memory in a Multi-Core Architecture

Modern shared-memory multi-core processors typically have shared Level 2(L2)or Level 3(L3)caches.Cache bottlenecks and replacement strategies are the main problems of such architectures,where multiple cores try to access the shared cache simultaneously.The main problem in improving memory performance is the shared cache architecture and cache replacement.This paper documents the implementation of a Dual-Port Content Addressable Memory(DPCAM)and a modified Near-Far Access Replacement Algorithm(NFRA),which was previously proposed as a shared L2 cache layer in a multi-core processor.Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation(SPEC)Central Processing Unit(CPU)2006 benchmark workloads are used to evaluate the benefit of the shared L2 cache layer.Results show improved performance of the multicore processor’s DPCAM and NFRA algorithms,corresponding to a higher number of concurrent accesses to shared memory.The new architecture significantly increases system throughput and records performance improvements of up to 8.7%on various types of SPEC 2006 benchmarks.The miss rate is also improved by about 13%,with some exceptions in the sphinx3 and bzip2 benchmarks.These results could open a new window for solving the long-standing problems with shared cache in multi-core processors.

Using multi-threads to hide deduplication I/O latency with low synchronization overhead

Data deduplication, as a compression method, has been widely used in most backup systems to improve bandwidth and space efficiency. As data exploded to be backed up, two main challenges in data deduplication are the CPU-intensive chunking and hashing works and the I/0 intensive disk-index access latency. However, CPU-intensive works have been vastly parallelized and speeded up by multi-core and many-core processors; the I/0 latency is likely becoming the bottleneck in data deduplication. To alleviate the challenge of I/0 latency in multi-core systems, multi-threaded deduplication （Multi-Dedup） architecture was proposed. The main idea of Multi-Dedup was using parallel deduplication threads to hide the I/0 latency. A prefix based concurrent index was designed to maintain the internal consistency of the deduplication index with low synchronization overhead. On the other hand, a collisionless cache array was also designed to preserve locality and similarity within the parallel threads. In various real-world datasets experiments, Multi-Dedup achieves 3-5 times performance improvements incorporating with locality-based ChunkStash and local-similarity based SiLo methods. In addition, Multi-Dedup has dramatically decreased the synchronization overhead and achieves 1.5-2 times performance improvements comparing to traditional lock-based synchronization methods.

System Architecture of Godson-3 Multi-Core Processors

Godson-3 is the latest generation of Godson microprocessor family. It takes a scalable multi-core architecture with hardware support for accelerating applications including X86 emulation and signal processing. This paper introduces the system architecture of Godson-3 from various aspects including system scalability, organization of memory hierarchy, network-on-chip, inter-chip connection and I/O subsystem.

Parallel computing of discrete element method on multi-core processors

This paper describes parallel simulation techniques for the discrete element method （DEM） on multi-core processors. Recently, multi-core CPU and GPU processors have attracted much attention in accelerating computer simulations in various fields. We propose a new algorithm for multi-thread parallel computation of DEM, which makes effective use of the available memory and accelerates the computation. This study shows that memory usage is drastically reduced by using this algorithm. To show the practical use of DEM in industry, a large-scale powder system is simulated with a complicated drive unit. We compared the performance of the simulation between the latest GPU and CPU processors with optimized programs for each processor. The results show that the difference in performance is not substantial when using either GPUs or CPUs with a multi-thread parallel algorithm. In addition, DEM algorithm is shown to have high scalabilitv in a multi-thread parallel computation on a CPU.

Energy Efficiency of a Multi-Core Processor by Tag Reduction

We consider the energy saving problem for caches on a multi-core processor. In the previous research on low power processors, there are various methods to reduce power dissipation. Tag reduction is one of them. This paper extends the tag reduction technique on a single-core processor to a multi-core processor and investigates the potential of energy saving for multi-core processors. We formulate our approach as an equivalent problem which is to find an assignment of the whole instruction pages in the physical memory to a set of cores such that the tag-reduction conflicts for each core can be mostly avoided or reduced. We then propose three algorithms using different heuristics for this assignment problem. We provide convincing experimental results by collecting experimental data from a real operating system instead of the traditional way using a processor simulator that cannot simulate operating system functions and the full memory hierarchy. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can save total energy up to 83.93% on an 8-core processor and 76.16% on a 4-core processor in average compared to the one that the tag-reduction is not used for. They also significantly outperform the tag reduction based algorithm on a single-core processor.

Schedule refinement for homogeneous multi-core processors in the presence of manufacturing-caused heterogeneity

Multi-core homogeneous processors have been widely used to deal with computation-intensive embedded applications. However, with the continuous down scaling of CMOS technology, within-die variations in the manufacturing process lead to a significant spread in the operating speeds of cores within homogeneous multi-core processors. Task scheduling approaches, which do not consider such heterogeneity caused by within-die variations,can lead to an overly pessimistic result in terms of performance. To realize an optimal performance according to the actual maximum clock frequencies at which cores can run, we present a heterogeneity-aware schedule refining(HASR) scheme by fully exploiting the heterogeneities of homogeneous multi-core processors in embedded domains.We analyze and show how the actual maximum frequencies of cores are used to guide the scheduling. In the scheme,representative chip operating points are selected and the corresponding optimal schedules are generated as candidate schedules. During the booting of each chip, according to the actual maximum clock frequencies of cores, one of the candidate schedules is bound to the chip to maximize the performance. A set of applications are designed to evaluate the proposed scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can improve the performance by an average value of 22.2%, compared with the baseline schedule based on the worst case timing analysis. Compared with the conventional task scheduling approach based on the actual maximum clock frequencies, the proposed scheme also improves the performance by up to 12%.

Thread Private Variable Access Optimization Technique for Sunway High-Performance Multi-core Processors

The primary way to achieve thread-level parallelism on the Sunwayhigh-performance multicore processor is to use the OpenMP programming technique.To address the problem of low parallelism efficiency caused by slow accessto thread private variables in the compilation of Sunway OpenMP programs, thispaper proposes a thread private variable access technique based on privilegedinstructions. The privileged instruction-based thread-private variable access techniquecentralizes the implementation of thread-private variables at the compilerlevel, eliminating the model switching overhead of invoking OS core processingand improving the speed of accessing thread-private variables. On the Sunway1621 server platform, NPB3.3-OMP and SPEC OMP2012 achieved 6.2% and6.8% running efficiency gains, respectively. The results show that the techniquesproposed in this paper can provide technical support for giving full play to theadvantages of Sunway’s high-performance multi-core processors.

Parallel Region Reconstruction Technique for Sunway High-Performance Multi-core Processors

The leading way to achieve thread-level parallelism on the Sunwayhigh-performance multicore processors is to use OpenMP programming techniques.In order to address the problem of low parallel efficiency caused by highthread group control overhead in the compilation of Sunway OpenMP programs,this paper proposes the parallel region reconstruction technique. The parallelregion reconstruction technique expands the parallel scope of parallel regionsin OpenMP programs by parallel region merging and parallel region extending.Moreover, it reduces the number of parallel regions in OpenMP programs,decreases the overhead of frequent creation and convergence of thread groups,and converts standard fork-join model OpenMP programs to higher performanceSPMD modelOpenMP programs. On the Sunway 1621 server computer, NPB3.3-OMP and SPEC OMP2012 achieved 8.9% and 7.9% running efficiency improvementrespectively through parallel region reconstruction technique. As a result,the parallel region reconstruction technique is feasible and effective. It providestechnical support to fully exploit the multi-core parallelism advantage of Sunway’shigh-performance processors.

OpenMDSP:Extending OpenMP to Program Multi-Core DSPs

Multi-core digital signal processors （DSPs） are widely used in wireless telecommunication, core network transcoding, industrial control, and audio/video processing technologies, among others. In comparison with general-purpose multi-processors, multi-core DSPs normally have a more complex memory hierarchy, such as on-chip core-local memory and non-cache-coherent shared memory. As a result, efficient multi-core DSP applications are very difficult to write. The current approach used to program multi-core DSPs is based on proprietary vendor software development kits （SDKs）, which only provide low-level, non-portable primitives. While it is acceptable to write coarse-grained task-level parallel code with these SDKs, writing fine-grained data parallel code with SDKs is a very tedious and error-prone approach. We believe that it is desirable to possess a high-level and portable parallel programming model for multi-core DSPs. In this paper, we propose OpenMDSP, an extension of OpenMP designed for multi-core DSPs. The goal of OpenMDSP is to fill the gap between the OpenMP memory model and the memory hierarchy of multi-core DSPs. We propose three classes of directives in OpenMDSP, including 1） data placement directives that allow programmers to control the placement of global variables conveniently, 2） distributed array directives that divide a whole array into sections and promote the sections into core-local memory to improve performance, and 3） stream access directives that promote big arrays into core-local memory section by section during parallel loop processing while hiding the latency of data movement by the direct memory access （DMA） of a DSP. We implement the compiler and runtime system for OpenMDSP on PreeScale MSC8156. The benchmarking results show that seven of nine benchmarks achieve a speedup of more than a factor of 5 when using six threads.

YHFT-QDSP:High-Performance Heterogeneous Multi-Core DSP

Multi-core architectures are widely used to in time-to-market and power consumption of the chips enhance the microprocessor performance within a limited increase Toward the application of high-density data signal processing, this paper presents a novel heterogeneous multi-core architecture digital signal processor （DSP）, YHFT-QDSP, with one RISC CPU core and 4 VLIW DSP cores. By three kinds of interconnection, YHFT-QDSP provides high efficiency message communication for inner-chip RISC core and DSP cores, inner-chip and inter-chip DSP cores. A parallel programming platform is specifically developed for the heterogeneous nmlti-core architecture of YHFT-QDSP. This parallel programming environment provides a parallel support library and a friendly interface between high level application softwares and multi- core DSP. The 130 nm CMOS custom chip design results benchmarks show that the interconnection structure of in a high speed and moderate power design. The results of typical YHFT-QDSP is much better than other related structures and achieves better speedup when using the interconnection facilities in combing methods. YHFT-QDSP has been signed off and manufactured presently. The future applications of the multi-core chip could be found in 3G wireless base station, high performance radar, industrial applications, and so on.

Performance modeling of positive degraded task-pair with helper-thread in CMP

Helper-thread of a task can hide the memory access time of irregular data on the chip muhi-core processor （CMP）. For constructing a compiler that effectively supports the helper-thread of a task in the multi-core scenario based on the last level shared cache, this paper studies its performance stable condi- tions. Unfortunately, there is no existing model that allows extensive investigation of the impact of stable conditions, we present the base of pre-computation that is formalized by our degraded task-pair 〈 T, T＇ 〉 with the helper-thread, and its stable conditions are analyzed. Finally, a novel performance model and a constructing method of pre-computation based on our positive degraded task-pair are proposed. The efficient results are shown by our experiments. If we further exploit memory level parallelism （MLP） for our task-pair, the task-pair 〈 T, T＇ 〉 can reach better performance.