Designing and building application‐centric parallel memories

Abstract

SummaryMemory bandwidth is a critical performance factor for many applications and architectures. Intuitively, a parallel memory could be a good solution for any bandwidth‐limited application, yet building application‐centric custom parallel memories remains a challenge. In this work, we present a comprehensive approach to tackle this challenge and demonstrate how to systematically design and implement application‐centric parallel memories. Specifically, our approach (1) analyzes the application memory access traces to extract parallel accesses, (2) configures our parallel memory for maximum performance, and (3) builds the actual application‐centric memory system. We further provide a simple performance prediction model for the constructed memory system. We evaluate our approach with two sets of experiments. First, we demonstrate how our parallel memories provide performance benefits for a broad range of memory access patterns. Second, we prove the feasibility of our approach and validate our performance model by implementing and benchmarking the designed parallel memories using FPGA hardware and a sparse version of the STREAM benchmark.