Content area

Abstract

Memory Hierarchy is of growing importance in system design today. As Moore's Law allows system designers to include more processors within their designs, data locality becomes a priority. Traditional multiprocessor systems on chip (MPSoC) experience difficulty scaling as the quantity of processors increases. This challenge is common behavior of memory accesses in a shared memory environment and causes a decrease in memory bandwidth as processor numbers increase. In order to provide the necessary levels of scalability, the computer architecture community has sought to decentralize memory accesses by distributing memory throughout the system. Distributed memory offers greater bandwidth due to decoupled access paths. Today's million gate Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) offer an invaluable opportunity to explore this type of memory hierarchy. FPGA vendors such as Xilinx provide dual-ported on-chip memory for decoupled access in addition to configurable sized memories. In this work, a new platform was created around the use of dual-ported SRAMs for distributed memory to explore the possible scalability of this form of memory hierarchy. However, developing distributed memory poses a tremendous challenge: supporting a linear address space that allows wide applicability to be achieved. Many have agreed that a linear address space eases the programmability of a system. Although the abstraction of disjointed memories via underlying architecture and/or new programming presents an advantage in exploring the possibilities of distributed memory, automatic data partitioning and migration remains a considerable challenge. In this research this challenge was dealt with by the inclusion of both a shared memory and distributed memory model. This research is vital because exposing the programmer to the underlying architecture while providing a linear address space results in desired standards of programmability and performance alike. In addition, standard shared memory programming models can be applied allowing the user to enjoy full scalable performance potential.

Details

1010268
Title
Extending the HybridThread SMP Model for Distributed Memory Systems
Number of pages
90
Degree date
2012
School code
0011
Source
MAI 50/05M, Masters Abstracts International
ISBN
978-1-267-30486-5
Committee member
Bobda, Christophe; Huang, Miaoqing
University/institution
University of Arkansas
Department
Computer Engineering
University location
United States -- Arkansas
Degree
M.S.Cmp.E.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
1509404
ProQuest document ID
1013615627
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/extending-hybridthread-smp-model-distributed/docview/1013615627/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Database
ProQuest One Academic