Control Flow Emulation on Tiled SIMD Architectures

Heterogeneous multi-core and streaming architectures such as the GPU, Cell, ClearSpeed, and Imagine processors have better power/ performance ratios and memory bandwidth than traditional architectures. These types of processors are increasingly being used to accelerate compute-intensive applications. Their performance advantage is achieved by using multiple SIMD processor cores but limiting the complexity of each core, and by combining this with a simplified memory system. In particular, these processors generally avoid the use of cache coherency protocols and may even omit general-purpose caches, opting for restricted caches or explictly managed local memory. We show how control flow can be emulated on such tiled SIMD architectures and how memory access can be organized to avoid the need for a general-purpose cache and to tolerate long memory latencies. Our technique uses streaming execution and multipass partitioning. Our prototype targets GPUs. On GPUs the memory system is deeply pi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CC
• Authors: Ghulam Lashari, Ondrej Lhoták, Michael McCool
• Keywords: CC 2008, General-purpose Cache, Memory Bandwidth, Simplified Memory System, System Software