Hardware and software support for NUMA computing on configurable emulated shared memory architectures

Martti Forsell, Erik Hansson, Christoph Kessler, Jari-Matti Mäkelä, Ville Leppänen

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

    2 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The emulated shared memory (ESM) architectures are good candidates for future general purpose parallel computers due to their ability to provide easy-to-use explicitly parallel synchronous model of computation to programmers as well as avoid most performance bottlenecks present in current multicore architectures. In order to achieve full performance the applications must, however, have enough thread-level parallelism (TLP). To solve this problem, in our earlier work we have introduced a class of configurable emulated shared memory (CESM) machines that provides a special non-uniform memory access (NUMA) mode for situations where TLP is limited or for direct compatibility for legacy code sequential computing or NUMA mechanism. Unfortunately the earlier proposed CESM architecture does not integrate the different modes of the architecture well together e.g. by leaving the memories for different modes isolated and therefore the programming interface is non-integrated. In this paper we propose a number of hardware and software techniques to support NUMA computing in CESM architectures in a seamless way. The hardware techniques include three different NUMA-shared memory access mechanisms and the software ones provide a mechanism to integrate NUMA computation into the standard parallel random access machine (PRAM) operation of the CESM. The hardware techniques are evaluated on our REPLICA CESM architecture and compared to an ideal CESM machine making use of the proposed software techniques
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publication2013 IEEE International Symposium on Parallell & Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum
    PublisherIEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
    Pages640-648
    ISBN (Print)978-0-7695-4979-8
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2013
    MoE publication typeA4 Article in a conference publication
    EventIEEE 27th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops and PhD Forum, IPDPSW 2013 - Boston, United States
    Duration: 20 May 201324 May 2013
    Conference number: 27

    Conference

    ConferenceIEEE 27th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops and PhD Forum, IPDPSW 2013
    Abbreviated titleIPDPSW 2013
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityBoston
    Period20/05/1324/05/13

    Keywords

    • models of computation
    • NUMA
    • parallel computing
    • PRAM
    • programming model
    • Shared memory emulation

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