Technical reports

Communication centric, multi-core, fine-grained processor architecture

Gregory A. Chadwick

April 2013, 165 pages

This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted September 2012 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam College.

DOI: 10.48456/tr-832

Abstract

With multi-core architectures now firmly entrenched in many application areas both computer architects and programmers now face new challenges. Computer architects must increase core count to increase explicit parallelism available to the programmer in order to provide better performance whilst leaving the programming model presented tractable. The programmer must find ways to exploit this explicit parallelism provided that scales well with increasing core and thread availability.

A fine-grained computation model allows the programmer to expose a large amount of explicit parallelism and the greater the level of parallelism exposed the better increasing core counts can be utilised. However a fine-grained approach implies many interworking threads and the overhead of synchronising and scheduling these threads can eradicate any scalability advantages a fine-grained program may have.

Communication is also a key issue in multi-core architecture. Wires do not scale as well as gates, making communication relatively more expensive compared to computation so optimising communication between cores on chip becomes important.

This dissertation presents an architecture designed to enable scalable fine-grained computation that is communication aware (allowing a programmer to optimise for communication). By combining a tagged memory, where each word is augmented with a presence bit signifying whether or not data is present in that word, with a hardware based scheduler, which allows a thread to wait upon a word becoming present with low overhead. A flexible and scalable architecture well suited to fine-grained computation can be created, one which enables this without needing the introduction of many new architectural features or instructions. Communication is made explicit by enforcing that accesses to a given area of memory will always go to the same cache, removing the need for a cache coherency protocol.

The dissertation begins by reviewing the need for multi-core architecture and discusses the major issues faced in their construction. It moves on to look at fine-grained computation in particular. The proposed architecture, known as Mamba, is then presented in detail with several software techniques suitable for use with it introduced. An FPGA implementation of Mamba is then evaluated against a similar architecture that lacks the extensions Mamba has for assisting in fine-grained computation (namely a memory tagged with presence bits and a hardware scheduler). Microbenchmarks examining the performance of FIFO based communication, MCS locks (an efficient spin-lock implementation based around queues) and barriers demonstrate Mamba’s scalability and insensitivity to thread count. A SAT solver implementation demonstrates that these benefits have a real impact on an actual application.

Full text

PDF (1.2 MB)

BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-832,
  author =	 {Chadwick, Gregory A.},
  title = 	 {{Communication centric, multi-core, fine-grained processor
         	   architecture}},
  year = 	 2013,
  month = 	 apr,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-832.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-832},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-832}
}