Data prefetching and cache replacement algorithms have been intensively studied in the design of high performance microprocessors. Typically, the data prefetcher operates in the private caches and does not interact with the replacement policy in the shared Last-Level Cache (LLC). Similarly, most replacement policies do not consider demand and prefetch requests as different types of requests. In particular, program counter (PC)-based replacement policies cannot learn from prefetch requests since the data prefetcher does not generate a PC value. PC-based policies can also be negatively affected by compiler optimizations. In this paper, we propose a holistic cache management technique called Kill-the-PC (KPC) that overcomes the weaknesses of traditional prefetching and replacement policy algorithms. KPC cache management has three novel contributions. First, a prefetcher which approximates the future use distance of prefetch requests based on its prediction confidence. Second, a simple replacement policy provides similar or better performance than current state-of-the-art PC-based prediction using global hysteresis. Third, KPC integrates prefetching and replacement policy into a whole system which is greater than the sum of its parts. Information from the prefetcher is used to improve the performance of the replacement policy and vice-versa. Finally, KPC removes the need to propagate the PC through entire on-chip cache hierarchy while providing a holistic cache management approach with better performance than state-of-the-art PC-, and non-PC-based schemes. Our evaluation shows that KPC provides 8% better performance than the best combination of existing prefetcher and replacement policy for multi-core workloads.

Designing prefetchers to maximize system performance often requires a delicate balance between coverage and accuracy. Achieving both high coverage and accuracy is particularly challenging in workloads with complex address patterns, which may require large amounts of history to accurately predict future addresses. This paper describes the Signature Path Prefetcher (SPP), which offers effective solutions for three classic challenges in prefetcher design. First, SPP uses a compressed history based scheme that accurately predicts complex address patterns. Second, unlike other history based algorithms, which miss out on many prefetching opportunities when address patterns make a transition between physical pages, SPP tracks complex patterns across physical page boundaries and continues prefetching as soon as they move to new pages. Finally, SPP uses the confidence it has in its predictions to adaptively throttle itself on a per-prefetch stream basis. In our analysis, we find that SPP improves performance by 27.2% over a no-prefetching baseline, and outperforms the state-of-the-art Best Offset prefetcher by 6.4%. SPP does this with minimal overhead, operating strictly in the physical address space, and without requiring any additional processor core state, such as the PC.

Modern computational workloads require abundant thread level parallelism (TLP), necessitating highly-parallel, many-core accelerators such as General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). GPGPUs place a heavy demand on the on-chip interconnect between the many cores and a few memory controllers (MCs). Thus, traffic is highly asymmetric, impacting on-chip resource utilization and system performance. Here, we analyze the communication demands of typical GPGPU applications, and propose efficient Network-on-Chip (NoC) designs to meet those demands. We show that the proposed schemes improve performance by up to 64.7%. Compared to the best of class prior work, our VC monopolizing and partitioning schemes improve performance by 25%.

For decades, the primary tools in alleviating the "Memory Wall" have been large cache hierarchies and dataprefetchers. Both approaches, become more challenging in modern, Chip-multiprocessor (CMP) design. Increasing the last-level cache (LLC) size yields diminishing returns in terms of performance per Watt, given VLSI power scaling trends, this approach becomes hard to justify. These trends also impact hardware budgets for prefetchers. Moreover, in the context of CMPs running multiple concurrent processes, prefetching accuracy is critical to prevent cache pollution effects. These concerns point to the need for a light-weight prefetcher with high accuracy. Existing data prefetchers may generally be classified as low-overhead and low accuracy (Next-n, Stride, etc.) or high-overhead and high accuracy (STeMS, ISB). Wepropose B-Fetch: a data prefetcher driven by branch prediction and effective address value speculation. B-Fetch leverages control flow prediction to generate an expected future path of the executing application. It then speculatively computes the effective address of the load instructions along that path based upon a history of past register transformations. Detailed simulation using a cycle accurate simulator shows a geometric mean speedup of 23.4% for single-threaded workloads, improving to 28.6% for multi-application workloads over a baseline system without prefetching. We find that B-Fetch outperforms an existing "best-of-class" light-weight prefetcher under single-threaded and multi programmed workloads by 9% on average, with 65% less storage overhead.

An ATM switch based on multistage interconnection networks with multiple paths can support higher bandwidth than that of buffered networks with single path by passing multiple packets to the same destination simultaneously. These multiple packets are buffered in the output buffer of the destination. The performance of output buffer in the switch with multiple paths is closely dependent on the output traffic distribution, which is the packet arrival rate at each output link destined to a given output port. As the nonuniformity of the output traffic distribution becomes higher, the performance of the output buffer as like delay and packet loss probability gets better. In this paper, we propose a new self-routing switch architecture with multiple paths called Fly network and analyze the performance of the switching network and the output buffer focusing on the output traffic distribution. It is shown that the Fly network supports best throughput and latency of the output buffer by producing a high degree of the nonuniform output traffic distribution.