Design Space Optimization of Shared Memory Architecture in Accelerator-rich Systems

Shared memory architectures, as opposed to private-only memories, provide a viable alternative to meet the ever-increasing memory requirements of multi-accelerator systems to achieve high performance under stringent area and energy constraints. However, an impulsive memory sharing degrades performance due to network contention and latency to access shared memory. We propose the Accelerator Shared Memory (ASM) framework to provide an optimal private/shared memory configuration and shared data allocation under a system’s resource and network constraints. Evaluations show ASM provides up to 34.35% and 31.34% improvement in performance and energy, respectively, over baseline systems.

Sparse matrix–vector multiplication

This chapter introduces irregular algorithms and presents the example of parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV), which is the central operation in iterative linear system solvers. The irregular sparsity pattern of the matrix does not change during the multiplication, which may be repeated many times. This justifies putting a lot of effort into finding a good data distribution. The Mondriaan distribution of a sparse matrix is a useful non-Cartesian distribution that can be found by hypergraph-based partitioning. The Mondriaan package implements such a partitioning and also the newer medium-grain partitioning method. The chapter analyses the special cases of random sparse matrices and Laplacian matrices. It uses performance profiles and geometric means to compare different partitioning methods. Furthermore, it presents the hybrid-BSP model and a hybrid-BSP SpMV, which are aimed at hybrid distributed/shared-memory architectures. The parallel SpMV can be incorporated in applications, ranging from PageRank computation to artificial neural networks.