Evaluation of Adaptive Memory Management Techniques on the Tilera TILE-Gx Platform

Abstract:
Manycore processor systems are likely to be the future system structure, and even within range for usage in desktop or mobile systems. Up to now, manycore processors like Intel SCC, Tilera TILE or KALRAY’s MPPA are primarily intended to use for high performance applications, utilizing several cores with direct inter-core communication to avoid access to external memory. The spreading of these manycore systems brings up new application scenarios with multiple concurrently running high-dynamic applications, changing I/O characteristics and a not predictable memory usage. Highly dynamic workloads with varying memory usage have to be utilized. In this paper the memory management of various manycore platforms is addressed. In more detail the Tilera TILE-Gx platform will be explained, presenting results of own evaluations accessing its memory system. Based on that, the concept of the autonomous self-optimizing memory architecture Self-aware Memory (SaM) exemplarily was implemented as a software layer on the Tilera platform. The results show that adaptive memory management techniques can be realized without much management overhead, in return achieving higher flexibility and and simple usage of memory in future system architectures.