PARSA seminar: Tagless Directory Coherence and Phantom-BTB
Event details
| Date | 30.10.2009 |
| Hour | 15:15 |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
While modern processors are capable of processing data at never before
seen speeds, this capability must be matched with an equally capable
memory system. It is for this reason that a large chunk of modern
processor chips is devoted to the memory hierarchy. Our work has been
looking at the design of these memory hierarchies. I will overview two
recent results. The first, Phantom-BTB, freeloads on the existing memory
hierarchy to store program metadata. This is information about program
behavior that is used at runtime to anticipate performance or other
degrading events and act accordingly to improve system behavior.
Phantom-BTB uses the on-chip memory hierarchy to obtain the performance
possible with otherwise impractical to build (too large and too slow)
structures. The second work, revisits on-chip memory coherence, that is,
how a processor can find where and who has copies of cached memory data.
Coherence can greatly impact program performance in today's chip
multiprocessors. Taking advantage of the opportunities that on-chip
integration offers, tagless coherence reduces the cost of implementing
coherence while maintaining competitive performance.
BIO: Andreas Moshovos is an associate professor at the University of
Toronto. He has taught computer architecture also at Northwestern
University, the Hellenic Open University and the National University of
Athens, Greece. He learned about computer architecture first at the
University of Crete, Greece, and then at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison where he worked on memory dependence prediction, a technique
used in many modern processor designs, until 1998. Andreas is interested
in designing computer systems that take advantage of program behavior to
improve performance, power and other characteristics. He received the
National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000, a Semiconductor
Research Corporation Inventor Recognition Award in 2003, and IBM Faculty
Partnership Awards in 2008 and 2009.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Michael Ferdman