Title
Traffic-aware frequency scaling for balanced on-chip networks on GPGPUs
Abstract
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) can provide orders of magnitude more computing power than general purpose processors (CPU) for highly parallel applications. For such parallel applications, the memory traffic pattern of GPGPUs behaves considerably different from that of CPUs. This gives rise to opportunities for optimizing the on-chip interconnection network (NoC) of GPGPUs. In this work, we first investigate the characteristics of GPGPU memory traffic of typical benchmarks and categorize the memory traffic patterns. Different traffic patterns require different throughput in the request and reply paths of the NoC to match the network load. To meet this requirement, we examine the feasibility of scaling the network frequency dynamically to balance the throughput of the request and reply networks. The decision is guided by monitoring some shader cores to identify the memory traffic pattern. Performance evaluation shows that this dynamic frequency tuning design can achieve up to 27% improvement in terms of execution speedup compared to a baseline setting and 7.4% improvement on average.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/PADSW.2014.7097795
ICPADS
Keywords
Field
DocType
shader cores,integrated circuit interconnections,highly parallel applications,network frequency,general-purpose computing,request networks,execution speedup,network load,graphics processing units,on-chip interconnection network,reply networks,memory traffic patterns,general purpose processors,gpgpu,performance evaluation,cpu,noc,balanced on-chip networks,network-on-chip,traffic-aware frequency scaling,dynamic frequency tuning design
Airfield traffic pattern,Computer science,Real-time computing,Frequency scaling,Throughput,Shader,Distributed computing,Speedup,Graphics,Computer architecture,Parallel computing,General-purpose computing on graphics processing units,Interconnection
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1521-9097
0
0.34
References 
Authors
11
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chiao-Yun Tu100.34
Yuan-Ying Chang2243.03
Chung-Ta King345074.71
Chien-Ting Chen400.34
Tai-Yuan Wang520.71