Application-specific hardware and reconfigurable processors can dramatically speed up compute-intensive kernels of applications, offloading the burden of main processor. To minimize the communication overhead in such a coprocessor approach, the two processors can share an on-chip memory, which may be considered by each processor as a scratchpad memory. However, this setup poses a significant challenge to the main processor, which now must manage data on the scratchpad explicitly, often resulting in superfluous data copy. This paper presents an enhancement to scratchpad, called Configurable Range Memory (CRM), that can reduce the need for explicit management and thus reduce data copy and promote data reuse on the shared memory. Our experimental results using benchmarks from DSP and multimedia applications demonstrate that our CRM architecture can significantly reduce the communication overhead compared to the architecture without shared memory, while not requiring explicit data management.
While programmable accelerators such as application-specific processors and reconfigurable architectures can dramatically speed up compute-intensive kernels of an application, application performance can still be severely limited by the communication between processors. To minimize the communication overhead, a shared memory such as a scratchpad memory may be employed between the main processor and the accelerator coprocessor. However, this setup poses a significant challenge to the main processor, which now must manage data on the scratchpad explicitly, resulting in superfluous data copying due to the inflexibility of a scratchpad. In this article, we present an enhancement of a scratchpad, Configurable Range Memory (CRM), whose address range can be reprogrammed to minimize unnecessary data copying between processors and therefore promote data reuse on the accelerator, and also present a software management algorithm for the CRM. Our experimental results involving detailed simulation of full multimedia applications demonstrate that our CRM architecture can reduce the communication overhead quite effectively, reducing the kernel execution time by up to 28% and the application runtime by up to 12.8%, in addition to considerable system energy reduction, compared to the conventional architecture based on a scratchpad. ACM Reference Format:Jongeun Lee, Seongseok Seo, Jongkyung Paek, and Kiyoung Choi. 2014. Configurable range memory for effective data reuse on programmable accelerators.
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