Study on Explicit Memory Management for CBEA Green Computing Architecture

Abstract

Heterogeneous multi-core processors are attractive for power efficient green computing because of their ability to meet varied resource requirements. The multi-level memory hierarchy of Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) which requires explicit management by software poses significant challenges to performance increasing and programming. In this paper, with analysis of characteristic of the architecture, we implemented four access methods and a corresponding access library with a uniform memory access interface. Besides getting performance boosts beyond current level technology, the memory access library with uniform access interface could collect profile information of memory management for further performance optimization. Experimental results show the performance of proposed method is better than related works and profile information provided by the method is helpful for programmer to optimize application performance.