Less is More: Experiences in Deconstructing Hardware Coherence
Event details
| Date | 07.06.2013 |
| Hour | 10:00 › 11:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Stefanos Kaxiras, Uppsala University |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Much of the complexity and overhead (directory, state bits, invalidations, broadcasts) of a typical hardware coherence implementation stems from the effort to make it “invisible” even to the strongest memory consistency models. In this talk, we show how a much simpler, directory-less/broadcast-less, multicore coherence can outperform a directory protocol without its complexity and overhead, with just a data-race-free guarantee from software. This simplification of coherence brings further simplifications to the entire on-chip memory system, for example unconstrained scaling to multiple buses, simple on-chip networks, and a new solution for efficient virtual-cache coherence. Significant area, energy, and performance benefits ensue as a result of simplifying the multicore memory organization, making our approach a prime candidate for coherent, shared-virtual-memory, heterogeneous architectures.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- SuRI 2013
Contact
- Simone Muller