Reducing Virtual-to-Physical address translation overhead in Distributed Shared Memory based multi-core Network-on-Chips according to data property

Abstract

In Network-on-Chip (NoC) based multi-core platforms, Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) preferably uses virtual addressing in order to hide the physical locations of the memories. However, this incurs performance penalty due to the Virtual-to-Physical (V2P) address translation overhead for all memory accesses. Based on the data property which can be either private or shared, this paper proposes a hybrid DSM which partitions a local memory into a private and a shared part. The private part is accessed directly using physical addressing and the shared part using virtual addressing. In particular, the partitioning boundary can be configured statically at design time and dynamically at runtime. The dynamic configuration further removes the V2P address translation overhead for those data with changeable property when they become private at runtime. In the experiments with three applications (matrix multiplication, 2D FFT, and H.264/AVC encoding), compared with the conventional DSM, our techniques show performance improvement up to 37.89%.