Memory Hierarchies for Future Hpc Architectures

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Memory Hierarchies for Future Hpc Architectures MEMORY HIERARCHIES FOR FUTURE HPC ARCHITECTURES V´ICTOR GARC´IA FLORES ADISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY /DOCTOR PER LA UPC TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA` DE CATALUNYA ADVISOR:NACHO NAVARRO CO-ADVISORS:ANTONIO J. PENA˜ ,EDUARD AYGUADE BARCELONA SEPTEMBER 2017 Abstract Efficiently managing the memory subsystem of modern multi/manycore architectures is in- creasingly becoming a challenge as systems grow in complexity and heterogeneity. From multicore architectures with several levels of on-die cache to heterogeneous systems com- bining graphics processing units (GPUs) and traditional general-purpose processors, the once simple Von Neumann machines have transformed into complex systems with a high reliance on an efficient memory subsystem. In the field of high performance computing (HPC) in particular, where massively parallel architectures are used and input sets of several terabytes are common, careful management of the memory hierarchy is crucial to exploit the full com- puting power of these systems. The goal of this thesis is to provide computer architects with valuable information to guide the design of future systems, and in particular of those more widely used in the field of HPC, i.e., symmetric multicore processors (SMPs) and GPUs. With that aim, we present an analysis of some of the inefficiencies and shortcomings of current memory management techniques and propose two novel schemes leveraging the opportunities that arise from the use of new and emerging programming models and computing paradigms. The first contribution of this thesis is a block prefetching mechanism for task-based pro- gramming models. Using a task-based programming model simplifies parallel programming and allows for better resource utilization in the large-scale supercomputers used in the field of HPC, while enabling sophisticated memory management techniques. The scheme pro- posed relies on a memory-aware runtime system to guide prefetching while avoiding the main drawbacks of traditional prefetching mechanisms, i.e., cache pollution, thrashing and lack of timeliness. It leverages the information provided by the user about tasks’ input and output data to prefetch contiguous blocks of memory that are certain to be useful. The pro- posed scheme targets SMPs with large cache hierarchies and uses heuristics to dynamically decide the best cache level to prefetch into without evicting useful data. The focus of this thesis then turns to heterogeneous architectures combining GPUs and traditional multicore processors. The current trend towards tighter coupling of GPU and CPU i Abstract enables new collaborative computations that tax the memory subsystem in a different manner than previous heterogeneous computations did, and requires careful analysis to understand the trade-offs that are to be expected when designing future memory organizations. The second contribution is an in-depth analysis on the impact of sharing the last-level cache between GPU and CPU cores on a system where the GPU is integrated on the same die as the CPU. The analysis focuses on the effect that a shared cache can have on collaborative computations where GPU and CPU threads concurrently work on a problem and share data at fine granularities. The results presented here show that sharing the last-level cache is largely beneficial as it allows for better resource utilization. In addition, the experimental evaluation shows that collaborative computations benefit significantly from the faster CPU- GPU communication and higher cache hit rates that a shared cache level provides. The final contribution of this thesis analyzes the inefficiencies and drawbacks of demand paging as currently implemented in discrete GPUs by NVIDIA. Then, it proposes a novel memory organization and dynamic migration scheme that allows for efficient data sharing between GPU and CPU, specially when executing collaborative computations where data is migrated back and forth between the two separate memories. This scheme migrates data at cache line granularities transparently to the user and operating system, avoiding false sharing and the unnecessary data transfers that occur on the current demand paging mechanism. The results show that the proposed scheme is able to outperform the baseline system by reducing the migration latency of data that is copied multiple times between the two memories. In addition, analysis of different interconnect latencies shows that fine-grained data sharing between GPU and CPU is feasible as long as future interconnect technologies achieve four to five times lower round-trip times than PCI-Express 3.0. ii Contents Abstracti Contentsv List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Glossary xi 1 Introduction1 1.1 Thesis Objectives and Contributions.....................5 1.1.1 Adaptive Runtime-Assisted Block Prefetching...........5 1.1.2 Last-Level Cache Sharing on Integrated Heterogeneous Architectures6 1.1.3 Efficient Data Sharing on Heterogeneous Architectures.......6 1.2 Thesis Organization..............................7 2 State of the Art9 2.1 Task-Based Programming Models......................9 2.2 Prefetching.................................. 10 2.2.1 Traditional Prefetching........................ 11 2.2.2 Block Prefetching........................... 14 2.3 Heterogeneous GPU-CPU Architectures................... 15 2.3.1 Resource Sharing on Integrated Architectures............ 17 2.3.2 Heterogeneous Computing...................... 19 2.3.3 Heterogeneous Memory Management................ 20 2.3.3.1 Memory Management on Heterogeneous Architectures. 20 2.3.3.2 Management of Hybrid Memory Designs......... 22 2.3.4 Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence............. 22 iii CONTENTS 3 Methodology 25 3.1 Simulation Infrastructure........................... 25 3.2 Workloads................................... 27 3.2.1 Adaptive Runtime-Assisted Block Prefetching........... 27 3.2.2 Heterogeneous Architectures..................... 28 3.3 Metrics.................................... 32 4 Adaptive Runtime-Assisted Block Prefetching 35 4.1 Motivation................................... 35 4.2 Target Architecture.............................. 36 4.3 Block Prefetching............................... 37 4.4 Multicore Data Transfer Engine....................... 38 4.5 Runtime-Assisted Prefetching........................ 39 4.5.1 Adaptive Destination......................... 41 4.5.2 Coordinating Hardware and Software Prefetch with Demand Loads 43 4.6 Methodology................................. 44 4.6.1 Hardware Prefetching........................ 44 4.6.2 Compiler-Based Software Prefetching................ 45 4.7 Experimental Evaluation........................... 46 4.7.1 Average Memory Access Time.................... 46 4.7.2 Cache Hit Rates............................ 47 4.7.3 Execution Time............................ 47 4.7.4 Energy Consumption......................... 50 4.8 Summary and Concluding Remarks..................... 51 5 Last-Level Cache Sharing on Integrated Heterogeneous Architectures 55 5.1 Motivation................................... 55 5.2 Methodology................................. 56 5.3 Experimental Evaluation........................... 58 5.3.1 Rodinia................................ 59 5.3.2 Collaborative Heterogeneous Benchmarks.............. 62 5.3.3 Energy................................ 67 5.4 Summary and Concluding Remarks..................... 68 6 Efficient Data Sharing on Heterogeneous Architectures 71 6.1 Motivation................................... 71 6.2 Demand Paging on GPUs........................... 72 iv CONTENTS 6.2.1 Page Faulting on Known-Pages................... 73 6.2.2 Unused Data and False Sharing................... 74 6.3 Efficient Data Sharing in Heterogeneous Architectures........... 75 6.3.1 Heterogeneous Memory Organization................ 75 6.3.2 Avoiding Host Intervention...................... 78 6.3.3 Efficient Fine-Grained Migration.................. 79 6.4 Methodology................................. 82 6.5 Experimental Evaluation........................... 83 6.5.1 Migration Granularity........................ 83 6.5.2 Impact of Block Sizes in Data Migrations.............. 87 6.5.3 Link Latency Analysis........................ 88 6.6 Summary and Concluding Remarks..................... 90 7 Conclusion and Future Work 91 7.1 Conclusions.................................. 91 7.2 Future Work.................................. 92 7.2.1 Runtime-Assisted Prefetching.................... 93 7.2.2 Resource Sharing on Integrated Systems............... 93 7.2.3 Efficient Data Sharing on Heterogeneous Architectures....... 94 A Publications 95 A.1 Thesis Related Publications.......................... 95 A.2 Other Publications.............................. 96 Bibliography 97 v CONTENTS vi List of Figures 1.1 Processor-memory performance gap. From ”Computer Architecture: A Quan- titative Approach” by John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson.........2 2.1 Example code of a Cholesky Decomposition in the OmpSs programming model..................................... 10 2.2 High level overview of a heterogeneous system composed of a multicore processor and a discrete GPU connected to the host through PCI-Express.. 16 2.3 High level overview of two integrated heterogeneous architectures with dif- ferent cache hierarchy designs........................ 17 3.1 Simulation workflow for OmpSs applications and TaskSim.......... 26 3.2 Simulation architecture of the gem5-gpu simulator.............. 26 4.1
Recommended publications
  • Memory Interference Characterization Between CPU Cores and Integrated Gpus in Mixed-Criticality Platforms
    Memory Interference Characterization between CPU cores and integrated GPUs in Mixed-Criticality Platforms Roberto Cavicchioli, Nicola Capodieci and Marko Bertogna University of Modena And Reggio Emilia, Department of Physics, Informatics and Mathematics, Modena, Italy [email protected] Abstract—Most of today’s mixed criticality platforms feature be put on the memory traffic originated by the iGPU, as it Systems on Chip (SoC) where a multi-core CPU complex (the represents a very popular architectural paradigm for computing host) competes with an integrated Graphic Processor Unit (iGPU, massively parallel workloads at impressive performance per the device) for accessing central memory. The multi-core host Watt ratios [1]. This architectural choice (commonly referred and the iGPU share the same memory controller, which has to to as General Purpose GPU computing, GPGPU) is one of the arbitrate data access to both clients through often undisclosed reference architectures for future embedded mixed-criticality or non-priority driven mechanisms. Such aspect becomes crit- ical when the iGPU is a high performance massively parallel applications, such as autonomous driving and unmanned aerial computing complex potentially able to saturate the available vehicle control. DRAM bandwidth of the considered SoC. The contribution of this paper is to qualitatively analyze and characterize the conflicts In order to maximize the validity of the presented results, due to parallel accesses to main memory by both CPU cores we considered different platforms featuring different memory and iGPU, so to motivate the need of novel paradigms for controllers, instruction sets, data bus width, cache hierarchy memory centric scheduling mechanisms. We analyzed different configurations and programming models: well known and commercially available platforms in order to i NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC (TK1), using CUDA 6.5 [2] for estimate variations in throughput and latencies within various memory access patterns, both at host and device side.
    [Show full text]
  • A Cache-Efficient Sorting Algorithm for Database and Data Mining
    A Cache-Efficient Sorting Algorithm for Database and Data Mining Computations using Graphics Processors Naga K. Govindaraju, Nikunj Raghuvanshi, Michael Henson, David Tuft, Dinesh Manocha University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill {naga,nikunj,henson,tuft,dm}@cs.unc.edu http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT Abstract els [3]. These techniques have been extensively studied for CPU-based algorithms. We present a fast sorting algorithm using graphics pro- Recently, database researchers have been exploiting the cessors (GPUs) that adapts well to database and data min- computational capabilities of graphics processors to accel- ing applications. Our algorithm uses texture mapping and erate database queries and redesign the query processing en- blending functionalities of GPUs to implement an efficient gine [8, 18, 19, 39]. These include typical database opera- bitonic sorting network. We take into account the commu- tions such as conjunctive selections, aggregates and semi- nication bandwidth overhead to the video memory on the linear queries, stream-based frequency and quantile estima- GPUs and reduce the memory bandwidth requirements. We tion operations,and spatial database operations. These al- also present strategies to exploit the tile-based computa- gorithms utilize the high memory bandwidth, the inherent tional model of GPUs. Our new algorithm has a memory- parallelism and vector processing functionalities of GPUs efficient data access pattern and we describe an efficient to execute the queries efficiently. Furthermore, GPUs are instruction dispatch mechanism to improve the overall sort- becoming increasingly programmable and have also been ing performance. We have used our sorting algorithm to ac- used for sorting [19, 24, 35]. celerate join-based queries and stream mining algorithms.
    [Show full text]
  • How to Solve the Current Memory Access and Data Transfer Bottlenecks: at the Processor Architecture Or at the Compiler Level?
    Hot topic session: How to solve the current memory access and data transfer bottlenecks: at the processor architecture or at the compiler level? Francky Catthoor, Nikil D. Dutt, IMEC , Leuven, Belgium ([email protected]) U.C.Irvine, CA ([email protected]) Christoforos E. Kozyrakis, U.C.Berkeley, CA ([email protected]) Abstract bedded memories are correctly incorporated. What is more controversial still however is how to deal with dynamic ap- Current processor architectures, both in the pro- plication behaviour, with multithreading and with highly grammable and custom case, become more and more dom- concurrent architecture platforms. inated by the data access bottlenecks in the cache, system bus and main memory subsystems. In order to provide suf- 2. Explicitly parallel architectures for mem- ficiently high data throughput in the emerging era of highly ory performance enhancement (Christo- parallel processors where many arithmetic resources can work concurrently, novel solutions for the memory access foros E. Kozyrakis) and data transfer will have to be introduced. The crucial question we want to address in this hot topic While microprocessor architectures have significantly session is where one can expect these novel solutions to evolved over the last fifteen years, the memory system rely on: will they be mainly innovative processor archi- is still a major performance bottleneck. The increasingly tecture ideas, or novel approaches in the application com- complex structures used for speculation, reordering, and piler/synthesis technology, or a mix. caching have improved performance, but are quickly run- ning out of steam. These techniques are becoming ineffec- tive in terms of resource utilization and scaling potential.
    [Show full text]
  • Shared Memory Multiprocessors
    Shared Memory Multiprocessors Logical design and software interactions 1 Shared Memory Multiprocessors Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs) • Symmetric access to all of main memory from any processor Dominate the server market • Building blocks for larger systems; arriving to desktop Attractive as throughput servers and for parallel programs • Fine-grain resource sharing • Uniform access via loads/stores • Automatic data movement and coherent replication in caches • Useful for operating system too Normal uniprocessor mechanisms to access data (reads and writes) • Key is extension of memory hierarchy to support multiple processors 2 Supporting Programming Models Message passing Programming models Compilation Multiprogramming or library Communication abstraction User/system boundary Shared address space Operating systems support Hardware/software boundary Communication hardware Physical communication medium • Address translation and protection in hardware (hardware SAS) • Message passing using shared memory buffers – can be very high performance since no OS involvement necessary • Focus here on supporting coherent shared address space 3 Natural Extensions of Memory System P1 Pn Switch P1 Pn (Interleaved) First-level $ $ $ Bus (Interleaved) Main memory Mem I/O devices (a) Shared cache (b) Bus-based shared memory P1 Pn P1 Pn $ $ $ $ Mem Mem Interconnection network Interconnection network Mem Mem (c) Dancehall (d) Distributed-memory 4 Caches and Cache Coherence Caches play key role in all cases • Reduce average data access time • Reduce bandwidth
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction to Multi-Threading and Vectorization Matti Kortelainen Larsoft Workshop 2019 25 June 2019 Outline
    Introduction to multi-threading and vectorization Matti Kortelainen LArSoft Workshop 2019 25 June 2019 Outline Broad introductory overview: • Why multithread? • What is a thread? • Some threading models – std::thread – OpenMP (fork-join) – Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) (tasks) • Race condition, critical region, mutual exclusion, deadlock • Vectorization (SIMD) 2 6/25/19 Matti Kortelainen | Introduction to multi-threading and vectorization Motivations for multithreading Image courtesy of K. Rupp 3 6/25/19 Matti Kortelainen | Introduction to multi-threading and vectorization Motivations for multithreading • One process on a node: speedups from parallelizing parts of the programs – Any problem can get speedup if the threads can cooperate on • same core (sharing L1 cache) • L2 cache (may be shared among small number of cores) • Fully loaded node: save memory and other resources – Threads can share objects -> N threads can use significantly less memory than N processes • If smallest chunk of data is so big that only one fits in memory at a time, is there any other option? 4 6/25/19 Matti Kortelainen | Introduction to multi-threading and vectorization What is a (software) thread? (in POSIX/Linux) • “Smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler” [Wikipedia] • A thread has its own – Program counter – Registers – Stack – Thread-local memory (better to avoid in general) • Threads of a process share everything else, e.g. – Program code, constants – Heap memory – Network connections – File handles
    [Show full text]
  • Prefetching for Complex Memory Access Patterns
    UCAM-CL-TR-923 Technical Report ISSN 1476-2986 Number 923 Computer Laboratory Prefetching for complex memory access patterns Sam Ainsworth July 2018 15 JJ Thomson Avenue Cambridge CB3 0FD United Kingdom phone +44 1223 763500 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ c 2018 Sam Ainsworth This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted February 2018 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Churchill College. Technical reports published by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory are freely available via the Internet: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/ ISSN 1476-2986 Abstract Modern-day workloads, particularly those in big data, are heavily memory-latency bound. This is because of both irregular memory accesses, which have no discernible pattern in their memory addresses, and large data sets that cannot fit in any cache. However, this need not be a barrier to high performance. With some data structure knowledge it is typically possible to bring data into the fast on-chip memory caches early, so that it is already available by the time it needs to be accessed. This thesis makes three contributions. I first contribute an automated software prefetch- ing compiler technique to insert high-performance prefetches into program code to bring data into the cache early, achieving 1.3 geometric mean speedup on the most complex × processors, and 2.7 on the simplest. I also provide an analysis of when and why this × is likely to be successful, which data structures to target, and how to schedule software prefetches well. Then I introduce a hardware solution, the configurable graph prefetcher.
    [Show full text]
  • Eth-28647-02.Pdf
    Research Collection Doctoral Thesis Adaptive main memory compression Author(s): Tuduce, Irina Publication Date: 2006 Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-005180607 Rights / License: In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted This page was generated automatically upon download from the ETH Zurich Research Collection. For more information please consult the Terms of use. ETH Library Doctoral Thesis ETH No. 16327 Adaptive Main Memory Compression A dissertation submitted to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH ZÜRICH) for the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences presented by Irina Tuduce Engineer, TU Cluj-Napoca born April 9, 1976 citizen of Romania accepted on the recommendation of Prof. Dr. Thomas Gross, examiner Prof. Dr. Lothar Thiele, co-examiner 2005 Seite Leer / Blank leaf Seite Leer / Blank leaf Seite Leer lank Abstract Computer pioneers correctly predicted that programmers would want unlimited amounts of fast memory. Since fast memory is expensive, an economical solution to that desire is a memory hierarchy organized into several levels. Each level has greater capacity than the preceding but it is less quickly accessible. The goal of the memory hierarchy is to provide a memory system with cost almost as low as the cheapest level of memory and speed almost as fast as the fastest level. In the last decades, the processor performance improved much faster than the performance of the memory levels. The memory hierarchy proved to be a scalable solution, i.e., the bigger the perfomance gap between processor and memory, the more levels are used in the memory hierarchy. For instance, in 1980 microprocessors were often designed without caches, while in 2005 most of them come with two levels of caches on the chip.
    [Show full text]
  • Detecting False Sharing Efficiently and Effectively
    W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Articles Arts and Sciences 2016 Cheetah: Detecting False Sharing Efficiently andff E ectively Tongping Liu Univ Texas San Antonio, Dept Comp Sci, San Antonio, TX 78249 USA; Xu Liu Coll William & Mary, Dept Comp Sci, Williamsburg, VA 23185 USA Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs Recommended Citation Liu, T., & Liu, X. (2016, March). Cheetah: Detecting false sharing efficiently and effectively. In 2016 IEEE/ ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO) (pp. 1-11). IEEE. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cheetah: Detecting False Sharing Efficiently and Effectively Tongping Liu ∗ Xu Liu ∗ Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science University of Texas at San Antonio College of William and Mary San Antonio, TX 78249 USA Williamsburg, VA 23185 USA [email protected] [email protected] Abstract 1. Introduction False sharing is a notorious performance problem that may Multicore processors are ubiquitous in the computing spec- occur in multithreaded programs when they are running on trum: from smart phones, personal desktops, to high-end ubiquitous multicore hardware. It can dramatically degrade servers. Multithreading is the de-facto programming model the performance by up to an order of magnitude, significantly to exploit the massive parallelism of modern multicore archi- hurting the scalability. Identifying false sharing in complex tectures.
    [Show full text]
  • Decompose and Conquer: Addressing Evasive Errors in Systems on Chip
    Decompose and Conquer: Addressing Evasive Errors in Systems on Chip by Doowon Lee A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Science and Engineering) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Valeria M. Bertacco, Chair Assistant Professor Reetuparna Das Professor Scott Mahlke Associate Professor Zhengya Zhang Doowon Lee [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0046-7746 c Doowon Lee 2018 For my wife, Ghaeun ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Valeria Bertacco. She has affected me in many aspects. She is the most enthusiastic person I have ever met; she always inspires me to achieve more than I could imagine. She has offered an extraordinary research mentorship throughout my Ph.D. journey. She has been consistently available whenever I need her thoughtful advice and keen insight. Also, she has been very patient about my research endeavors, allowing me to navigate different research topics. Her guidance on writing and presentation has been helpful for me to become an outstanding professional after graduation. I also thank my dissertation committee members, Professors Scott Mahlke, Reetuparna Das, and Zhengya Zhang. Their comments on my research projects have been invaluable for me to improve this dissertation. In particular, in-depth discussions with them stimulate me to think out of the box, which in turn strengthens the impacts of the research proposed in the dissertation. Our research group members have helped enjoy a long journey to the degree at the University of Michigan. First of all, I am grateful to Professor Todd Austin for his advice on my research projects.
    [Show full text]
  • A Design Methodology for Soft-Core Platforms on FPGA with SMP Linux
    Muttillo et al. EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems (2016) 2016:15 EURASIP Journal on DOI 10.1186/s13639-016-0051-9 Embedded Systems RESEARCH Open Access A design methodology for soft-core platforms on FPGA with SMP Linux, OpenMP support, and distributed hardware profiling system Vittoriano Muttillo1*, Giacomo Valente1, Fabio Federici1, Luigi Pomante1, Marco Faccio1,CarloTieri2 and Serenella Ferri2 Abstract In recent years, the use of multiprocessor systems has become increasingly common. Even in the embedded domain, the development of platforms based on multiprocessor systems or the porting of legacy single-core applications are frequent needs. However, such designs are often complicated, as embedded systems are characterized by numerous non-functional requirements and a tight hardware/software integration. This work proposes a methodology for the development and validation of an embedded multiprocessor system. Specifically, the proposed method assumes the use of a portable, open source API to support the parallelization and the possibility of prototyping the system on a field-programmable gate array. On this basis, the proposed flow allows an early exploration of the hardware configuration space, a preliminary estimate of performance, and the rapid development of a system able to satisfy the design specifications. An accurate assessment of the actual performance of the system is then enforced by the use of an hardware-based profiling subsystem. The proposed design flow is described, and a version specifically designed for LEON3 processor
    [Show full text]
  • Improving Multiprocessor Performance with Coarse-Grain Coherence Tracking
    Improving Multiprocessor Performance with Coarse-Grain Coherence Tracking Jason F. Cantin, Mikko H. Lipasti, and James E. Smith Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Wisconsin, Madison {jcantin, mikko, jes}@ece.wisc.edu Abstract caused by broadcasts, high performance multiprocessor To maintain coherence in conventional shared-memory systems decouple the coherence mechanism from the data multiprocessor systems, processors first check other proc- transfer mechanism, allowing data to be moved directly essors’ caches before obtaining data from memory. This from a memory controller to a processor either over a coherence checking adds latency to memory requests and separate data network [1, 2, 3], or separate virtual chan- leads to large amounts of interconnect traffic in broadcast- nels [4]. This approach to dividing data transfer from based systems. Our results for a set of commercial, scien- coherence enforcement has significant performance poten- tific and multiprogrammed workloads show that on tial because the broadcast bottleneck can be sidestepped. average 67% (and up to 94%) of broadcasts are unneces- Many memory requests simply do not need to be broadcast sary. to the entire system, either because the data is not currently Coarse-Grain Coherence Tracking is a new technique shared, the request is an instruction fetch, the request that supplements a conventional coherence mechanism writes modified data back to memory, or the request is for and optimizes the performance of coherence enforcement. non-cacheable I/O data. The Coarse-Grain Coherence mechanism monitors the coherence status of large regions of memory, and uses that 1.1. Coarse-Grain Coherence Tracking information to avoid unnecessary broadcasts.
    [Show full text]
  • How to Manually Switch Graphics Cards Macbook Pro
    How To Manually Switch Graphics Cards Macbook Pro How to manually switch between dedicated and integrated graphics Is there a "hack" to switch between graphics processors on the Retina Display MacBook Pro makes it possible to easily switch between graphics cards manually on these. gpu-switch is an application that allows to switch between the graphic cards of dual-GPU Macbook Pro models. On these computers, the "automatic graphics switching" option is turned on by how to determine which graphics card is in use on a 15" or 17" MacBook Pro. MacBook Pro models that were affected by this problem would often have visual the picture above for a half a second while switching between graphics cards). capsule backup in this mode so have to keep manually backing up my data. When using a Mac that supports automatic graphics switching, the system will Two entries should appear under Video Card: "Intel HD Graphics 4000". Installing Arch Linux on a MacBook (Air/Pro) or an iMac is quite similar to installing it on any other computer. Boot installation medium and switch to a free tty. and work through until you get to Prepare Hard Drive and use the "Manually configure block devices. Different MacBook models have different graphic cards. How To Manually Switch Graphics Cards Macbook Pro Read/Download Several support threads discussing issue related to GPU switching. Some early Retina-equipped MacBook Pro users are seeing graphical issues in Safari. Earlier "Late 2008" and "Mid-2009" MacBook Pro models equipped with dual graphics A tool called gfxCardStatus allows to switch it manually: gfx.io/.
    [Show full text]