lmpulse Memory system support for scientific applications

摘要

Impulse is a new memory system architecture that adds two important features to a traditional memory controller. First, lmpulse supports application-specific optimizations through configurable physical address remapping. By remap- ping physical addresses, applications control how their data is accessed and cached, improving their cache and bus uti- lization. Second, Impulse supports prefetching at the mem- ory controller, which can hide much of the latency of DRAM accesses. Because it requires no modification to processor, cache, or bus designs, Impulse can be adopted in conven- tional svstems. In this paper we describe the design of the lmpulse archi- tecture, and show how an lmpulse memory system can im- prove the performance of memory-bound scientific applica tions. For instance, lmpulse decreases the running time of the NAS conjugate gradient benchmark by 67. We expect that Impulse will also benefit regularly strided, memory-bound applications of commercial importance, such as database and multimedia programs.