Efficient Heap Data Management on Software Managed Manycore Architectures

Abstract

Software Managed Manycore (SMM) architectures have been proposed as a solution for scaling the memory architecture. In a typical SMM architecture, Scratch Pad Memories (SPM) is used instead of caches, and data must be explicitly managed in software. While all code and data need to be managed, heap management on SMMs is especially challenging due to the highly dynamic nature of heap data access. Existing techniques spend over 90% of execution time on heap data management, which largely compromised the power efficiency of SMM architectures. This paper presents compiler-based efficient techniques that reduce heap management overhead. Experimental results on benchmarks from MiBench executing on an SMM processor modeled in Gem5 demonstrate that our approach implemented in LLVM 3.8 can improve execution time by an average of 80%, compared to the state-of-the-art.