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Computer Science Department Colloquium
4/21/2014 02:00 pm
CoRE A(Room 301)

How to feed data to your accelerator?

Arrvindh Shriraman, Simon Fraser University (Canada)

Faculty Host: Santosh Nagarakatte

Abstract

To counter the loss of dennard scaling chip designers have focused on energy-efficient compute accelerators. It imperative to improve the energy efficiency of data delivery and ensure that the memory interface is comprehensible to a wide variety of programmers.

In this talk, I will focus on our recent IEEE MICRO TOP PICKs work on providing energy efficient cache coherence for accelerators. I will discuss a new time-based coherence framework, called Temporal Coherence (TC), that exploits globally synchronized counters in single-chip systems to develop a streamlined coherence protocol. I will  present two memory models: TC-strong and TC-weak for accelerators, and evaluate the performance benefits of weak memory models . Finally, I will discuss important on-chip communication optimizations enabled by TC to reduce data transfer latency and network bandwidth.

Bio

Arrvindh Shriraman is an assistant professor Simon Fraser University (Canada) where he co-leads the SYNAR research group. His research interests include multiprocessor system design, hardware-software interface, and parallel programming models. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester.