Paper Info
Title
Dma-based prefetching for i/o-intensive workloads on the cell architecture
Abstract
Recent advent of the asymmetric multi-core processors such as Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE) has popularized the use of heterogeneous architectures. A growing body of research is exploring the use of such architectures, especially in High-End Computing, for supporting scientific applications. However, prior research has focused on use of the available Cell/BE operating systems and runtime environments for supporting compute-intensive jobs. Data and I/O intensive workloads have largely been ignored in this domain. In this paper, we take the first steps in supporting I/O intensive workloads on the Cell/BE and deriving guidelines for optimizing the execution of I/O workloads on heterogeneous architectures. We explore various performance enhancing techniques for such workloads on an actual Cell/BE system. Among the techniques we explore, an asynchronous prefetching-based approach, which uses the PowerPC core of the Cell/BE for file prefetching and decentralized DMAs from the synergistic processing cores (SPE's), improves the performance for I/O workloads that include an encryption/decryption component by 22.2%, compared to I/O performed naïvely from the SPE's. Our evaluation shows promising results and lays the foundation for developing more efficient I/O support libraries for multi-core asymmetric architectures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1366230.1366236
Conf. Computing Frontiers
Keywords
Field
DocType
o-intensive workloads,cell broadband engine,available cell,o support library,prior research,dma-based prefetching,asymmetric multi-core processor,cell architecture,multi-core asymmetric architecture,actual cell,heterogeneous architecture,o workloads,o intensive workloads,multi core processor,operating system,high performance computing
Asynchronous communication,Architecture,Supercomputer,Computer science,Parallel computing,Input/output,Encryption,Broadband,Real-time computing,PowerPC
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.62
38
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
M. Mustafa Rafique115715.49
Ali R. Butt265147.51
Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos31469128.40