A co-processor approach for accelerating data-structure intensive algorithms

Many important software applications are dominated by non-trivial serial components: Amdahl's Law places a hard upper bound on possible speedup that can be achieved for these applications. In this paper, we propose an integrated software/hardware approach for accelerating hard serial bottleneck...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in2010 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design pp. 431 - 438
Main Authors Loew, J, Elwell, J, Ponomarev, D, Madden, P H
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2010
Subjects
Acceleration
Containers
Data structures
Hardware
Instruction sets
Multicore processing
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Many important software applications are dominated by non-trivial serial components: Amdahl's Law places a hard upper bound on possible speedup that can be achieved for these applications. In this paper, we propose an integrated software/hardware approach for accelerating hard serial bottlenecks in data structure heavy algorithms. The key idea is to overlap the processing of the main algorithmic functions and the data structure related operations. We describe the language, compiler, ISA and architectural support for such data structure co-processing (DSCP), and define a clean interface between the software and the hardware. We perform extensive simulations using the popular C++ STL container classes, as well as a detailed implementation of our approach for Dijkstra's single-source shortest path algorithm. We find potential for improvements that are well beyond what can be achieved with more conventional parallel computation methods.
ISBN:1424489369
9781424489367
ISSN:1063-6404
2576-6996
DOI:10.1109/ICCD.2010.5647669