2021/04/23 by Johnathan Alsop, Alsop, Johnathan, Weon Taek Na +7
Computer Science · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2104.11678
openalex publication_date 2021/04/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Hardware specialization is becoming a key enabler of energyefficient performance. Future systems will be increasingly heterogeneous, integrating multiple specialized and programmable accelerators, each with different memory demands. Traditionally, communication between accelerators has been inefficient, typically orchestrated through explicit DMA transfers between different address spaces. More recently, industry has proposed unified coherent memory which enables implicit data movement and more data reuse, but often these interfaces limit the coherence flexibility available to heterogeneous systems. This paper demonstrates the benefits of fine-grained coherence specialization for heterogeneous systems. We propose an architecture that enables low-complexity independent specialization of each individual coherence request in heterogeneous workloads by building upon a simple and flexible baseline coherence interface, Spandex. We then describe how to optimize individual memory requests to improve cache reuse and performance-critical memory latency in emerging heterogeneous workloads. Collectively, our techniques enable significant gains, reducing execution time by up to 61% or network traffic by up to 99% while adding minimal complexity to the Spandex protocol.