Distributed Caching in the Tartan Reconfigurable Fabric

Tuesday September 26, 2006
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:30 pm

Mahim Mishra
Carnegie Mellon University

Tartan is a large, defect-tolerant reconfigurable fabric aimed at achieving high energy-efficiency at near-superscalar performance. Our preliminary investigations show that the Tartan fabric can achieve two orders of magnitude better energy-delay than superscalars while executing entire programs from standard benchmark suites. However, performance still lags behind a superscalar from the same technology generation by about 30% on average, with some programs showing significant slowdown. Much of this loss of performance is attributable to the high cost of accessing Tartan's single data cache.

In this talk, I present some ideas and preliminary work towards an implementation of distributed caching in Tartan. I begin with a survey of the literature on distributed caching that is of relevance to Tartan, followed by a discussion of how program analysis and profiling can help us with coherence decisions and improvements like prefetching. Finally, I present some preliminary implementation results and directions for future work. Since this is very much a work in progress, all feedback and criticism is welcome.

Mahim is an Nth-year graduate student in the Computer Science Department at CMU, advised by Seth Goldstein. He is a part of the Phoenix project, where he works on the Tartan reconfigurable fabric and defect-tolerance issues, and occasionally tinkers with the CASH compiler. Mahim obtained a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2001, and an MS in Computer Science from CMU in June 2006.