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Abstract

The hoard is a paged virtual memory system for program data designed for the Cell Broadband
Engine processor (Cell BE). The hoard makes it easier to utilise the performance
available from the processor’s Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs). Traditional highperformance
hardware cache designs are not well-suited to being implemented in software
on the Cell BE architecture, so the hoard takes advantage of the SPE’s wide registers
to implement a multi-level page table. This permits fast, fully associative lookup into a
dynamically-sized collection of data pages. Write-back of all pages is performed (not just
those modified) and a first-in first-out page replacement method is used. This design is
compared with the software cache provided with the IBM SDK for Multicore Acceleration
— a fixed-size, four-way set associative design, using a traditional hardware approach —
through extensive experiments with a diverse range of benchmarks. An in-depth analysis
is made of the performance of the hoard design, addressing its strengths and shortcomings.
From this analysis, potential improvements to the hoard are considered, implemented,
and their relative benefits measured. Changes include the tracking of page modification,
pre-writing of pages, use of a write-through policy, pre- and partial-fetching of pages, and
alternative replacement algorithms. Results show that simple and speculative methods are
often the most beneficial, and that performance varies greatly depending on the memory
access patterns of a particular program. It was found that programs with high locality of
access will perform better when using the hoard, in some cases exceeding the performance
of the same program running on the Power Processor Element of the Cell BE. For programs
with lower locality of reference, performance of the hoard and SDK cache are within a few
percent of one another.
An additional design goal for the hoard is to make the access and management of data
outside of the SPE’s local store as transparent as possible to the programmer. Not implemented
as part of a particular compiler, the hoard is a compile- and run-time library that
makes use of C++ language features to provide a natural pointer interface, requiring a
minimal amount of changes to existing programs. Careful implementation of the interface
ensures that program semantics are well preserved and accidental misuse is discouraged,
while taking advantage of the features of the Cell BE to provide high-speed lookup. The
result is a tool that facilitates the reuse of a broad range of existing code-bases on the SPE.

Item Type:	Thesis - PhD
Authors/Creators:	Adamczewski, J
Keywords:	CellBE, SPE, software cache, virtual memory
Additional Information:	Copyright 2011 the Author
Item Statistics:	View statistics for this item

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