Efficient asynchronous memory copy operations on multi-core systems and I/OAT

Bulk memory copies incur large overheads such as CPU stalling (i.e., no overlap of computation with memory copy operation), small register-size data movement, cache pollution, etc. Asynchronous copy engines introduced by Intel's I/O Acceleration Technology help in alleviating these overheads by offloading the memory copy operations using several DMA channels. However, the startup overheads associated with these copy engines such as pinning the application buffers, posting the descriptors and checking for completion notifications, limit their overlap capability. In this paper, we propose two schemes to provide complete overlap of memory copy operation with computation by dedicating the critical tasks to a single core in a multi-core system. In the first scheme, MCI (Multi-Core with I/OAT), we offload the memory copy operation to the copy engine and onload the startup overheads to the dedicated core. For systems without any hardware copy engine support, we propose a second scheme, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Karthikeyan Vaidyanathan, Lei Chai, Wei Huang, Dhabaleswar K. Panda
• Keywords: Asynchronous Memory Copy, CLUSTER 2007, Copy Engine, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Memory Copy Operations