Memory System Support for Irregular Applications

Because irregular applications have unpredictable memory access patterns, their performance is dominated by memory behavior. The Impulse con gurable memory controller will enable signi cant performance improvements for irregular applications, because it can be congured to optimize memory accesses on an application-by-application basis. In this paper we describe the optimizations that the Impulse controller supports for sparse matrix-vector product, an important computational kernel, and outline the transformations that the compiler and runtime system must perform to exploit these optimizations.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: LCR
• Authors: John B. Carter, Wilson C. Hsieh, Mark R. Swanson, Lixin Zhang, Erik Brunvand, Al Davis, Chen-Chi Kuo, Ravindra Kuramkote, Michael Parker, Lambert Schaelicke, Leigh Stoller, Terry Tateyama
• Keywords: Gurable Memory Controller, Irregular Applications, LCR 1998, System Software, Unpredictable Memory Access