UPCRC Research Seminar - ScalableBulk: Scalable Cache Coherence for Atomic Blocks in a Lazy Environment Thursday March 3, 2011

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This presentation is OPEN to the public.

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UPCRC Research Seminar

ScalableBulk: Scalable Cache Coherence for Atomic Blocks in a Lazy Environment

by Xuehai Qian, Illinois Computer Science

Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 2 PM (Central Time)

2405 Siebel Center for Computer Science

Live Stream: http://media.cs.illinois.edu/live/UPCRClive.asx

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Abstract: Recently-proposed architectures that continuously operate on atomic blocks of instructions (also called chunks) can boost the programmability and performance of shared-memory multiprocessing. However, they must support chunk operations very efficiently. In particular, in lazy conflict-detection environments, it is key that they provide scalable chunk commits. Unfortunately, current proposals typically fail to enable maximum overlap of conflict-free chunk commits.

This paper presents a novel directory-based protocol that enables highly-overlapped, scalable chunk commits. The protocol, called ScalableBulk, builds on the previously-proposed BulkSC protocol. It introduces three general hardware primitives for scalable commit: preventing access to a set of directory entries, grouping directory modules, and initiating the commit optimistically. Our results with SPLASH-2 and PARSEC codes with up to 64 processors show that ScalableBulk enables highly-overlapped chunk commits and delivers scalable performance. Unlike previously proposed schemes, it removes practically all commit stalls.

Bio: Xuehai Qian is a PhD student in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works with Prof. Josep Torrellas. His research lies within the fields of cache and memory system design for multi- or many-core. He is currently particularly interested in the scalable and efficient support for atomic operation. He received his bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Beihang University, and his master's degree in computer science from Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences. This particular work has been published in MICRO, 2010.

This presentation is OPEN to the public.