Exploiting Amorphous Data Parallelism Through Software and Architecture Co-Design
Abstract
To address serious technology challenges, computer system designers are increasingly turning to a heterogeneous mix of general-purpose multicores and data-parallel accelerators integrated onto a single die. Unfortunately, this heterogeneity clearly increases complexity and costs at all levels of the computing stack. To complicate matters further, emerging application workloads are often exhibit amorphous data-parallelism with irregular control flow, unstructured data accesses, atomic tasks, and dynamic work generation. Significant breakthroughs to address these challenges will not happen by exploring either software or hardware in isolation. Therefore, this project used a cross-layer approach to rethink the software and hardware for heterogeneous systems with specific attention to efficiently supporting amorphous data parallelism. At the heart of our proposal was a new explicit-parallel-call (XPC) architectural design pattern that is based on the concept of explicitly encoding parallel function calls in the software/hardware interface.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 16, 2019
- Accession Number
- AD1085851
Entities
People
- Christopher Batten
Organizations
- Cornell University