DMA-based prefetching for i/o-intensive workloads on the cell architecture

Recent advent of the asymmetric multi-core processors such as Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE) has popularized the use of heterogeneous architectures. A growing body of research is exploring the use of such architectures, especially in High-End Computing, for supporting scientific applications. However, prior research has focused on use of the available Cell/BE operating systems and runtime environments for supporting compute-intensive jobs. Data and I/O intensive workloads have largely been ignored in this domain. In this paper, we take the first steps in supporting I/O intensive workloads on the Cell/BE and deriving guidelines for optimizing the execution of I/O workloads on heterogeneous architectures. We explore various performance enhancing techniques for such workloads on an actual Cell/BE system. Among the techniques we explore, an asynchronous prefetching-based approach, which uses the PowerPC core of the Cell/BE for file prefetching and decentralized DMAs from the synergistic ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CF
• Authors: M. Mustafa Rafique, Ali Raza Butt, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos
• Keywords: Applied Computing, CF 2008, Heterogeneous Architectures, I/O Intensive Workloads, I/O Workloads