Dynamic on-chip memory management for chip multiprocessors

One of the most important issues in designing a chip multiprocessor is to decide its on-chip memory organization. A poor on-chip memory design can have serious power and performance implications when running data-intensive embedded applications. While it is possible to design an application-specific memory architecture, this may not be the best option, in particular when storage demands of individual processors and/or their data sharing patterns can change from one point in execution to another for the same application. In this paper, we consider dynamic configuration of software-managed on-chip memory space to adapt runtime variations in data storage demand and interprocessor sharing patterns. The proposed framework is fully implemented using an optimizing compiler, a polyhedral tool, and a memory partitioner (based on integer linear programming), and tested using a suite of eight data-intensive embedded applications. Our experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed technique is very effective in practice and leads to much less energy consumption than all the alternate memory management schemes tested, including one that comes up with an application-specific memory.