Portable memory consistency for software managed distributed memory in many-core SoC

J.H. Rutgers, Marco Jan Gerrit Bekooij, Gerardus Johannes Maria Smit

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

    2 Citations (Scopus)
    216 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Porting software to different platforms can require modifications of the application. One of the issues is that the targeted hardware supports another memory consistency model. As a consequence, the completion order of reads and writes in a multi-threaded application can change, which may result in improper synchronization. For example, a processor with out-of-order execution could break synchronization if proper fence instructions are missing. Such a bug can cause sporadic errors, which are hard to debug. This paper presents an approach that makes applications independent of the memory model of the hardware, hence they can be compiled to hardware with any memory architecture. The key is having a memory model that only guarantees the most fundamental orderings of reads and writes, and annotations to specify additional ordering constraints. As a result, tooling can transparently and properly implement fences, cache flushes, etc. when appropriate, without losing flexibility of the hardware design. In a case study, several SPLASH-2 applications are run on a 32-core software cache coherent MicroBlaze system in FPGA. Moreover, this approach also allows mapping to scratch-pad memories and a distributed shared memory architecture.
    Original languageUndefined
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 27th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2013) - 20th Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop (RAW 2013)
    Place of PublicationUSA
    PublisherIEEE
    Pages212-221
    Number of pages10
    ISBN (Print)978-0-7695-4979-8
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 21 May 2013
    Event20th Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop, RAW 2013 - Boston, United States
    Duration: 20 May 201324 May 2013
    Conference number: 20
    http://www.ece.lsu.edu/vaidy/raw13/

    Publication series

    Name
    PublisherIEEE Computer Society

    Workshop

    Workshop20th Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop, RAW 2013
    Abbreviated titleRAW
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityBoston
    Period20/05/1324/05/13
    Internet address

    Keywords

    • EWI-23363
    • IR-86199
    • METIS-297648
    • CAES-EEA: Efficient Embedded Architectures

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