RDMM: Runtime dynamic migration mechanism of distributed cache for reconfigurable array processor

Abstract

Reconfigurable array processors have emerged as powerful solution to speed up computationally intensive applications. However, they may suffer from a data access bottleneck as the frequency of memory access rises. At present, the distributed cache design in the reconfigurable array processor has a large cache failure rate, and the frequent access to external memory leads to a long delay in memory access. To mitigate this problem, we present a Runtime Dynamically Migration Mechanism (RDMM) of distributed cache for reconfigurable array processor based on the feature of obvious locality and high parallelism in accessing data. This mechanism allows temporary, static data to be dynamically scheduled to migrate data with a high access frequency from the remote cache to the processor's local migration storage table based on how often the reconfigurable array processors access the remote cache. We can accurately get the data on the shortest path by way of data search strategy based on migration storage tables, thereby effectively reducing the access delay of the entire system, increasing the memory bandwidth of the reconfigurable array processor. We leverage the hardware platform of reconfigurable array processor to test the proposed mechanism. The experimental results show that RDMM reduces access delay by up to 35.24% compared with the tradition distributed cache at the highest conflict rate. And compared with the Ref.[19], Ref.[20], Ref.[21] and Ref.[23], the working frequency can be increased by 15%, the hit rate can be increased by 6.1%, and the peak bandwidth can be increased by about 3×.