CAREER: Closing the Memory Gap for Unstructured Applications

许多重要的非数值应用程序都是数据密集型的;因此，随着未来处理器和内存速度之间的差距扩大，它们将经历性能下降。 与科学工作负载不同，非数值应用程序执行非结构化计算，表现出低控制流和地址流可预测性，以及低指令和线程级并行性。 这些属性限制了现有技术在非数值应用程序上提高内存性能的有效性。该CAREER奖通过综合研究和教育议程解决了非数值应用程序的内存缺口问题。 在研究中，将开发几种新的延迟容忍技术来针对非结构化计算。 首先，将研究通过运行时配置文件信息引导预取插装的技术，以解决不可预测的程序行为。 第二，指针预取技术，积极调度串行化的内存操作将被开发，以暴露在指针密集型计算的内存并行。 最后，“代码空间”预取调度技术将进行调查，使预取沿着多个路径的执行中常见的非结构化计算。 在教育方面，通过研究开发的专题和工具将被纳入强调“边做边学”理念的课程。 此外，还将创建本科研究项目和研究生研讨会。 总之，这些教育活动将产生学生在实验系统的强大背景。

Many important non-numeric applications are data intensive; hence, they will experience performance degradations as the gap between future processor and memory speeds widen. Unlike scientific workloads, non-numeric applications perform unstructured computations that exhibit low control-flow and address stream predictability, and low instruction and thread-level parallelism. These attributes limit the effectiveness of existing techniques for improving memory performance on non-numeric applications.This CAREER award addresses the memory gap problem for non-numeric applications through an integrated research and education agenda. In research, several novel latency tolerance techniques will be developed to target unstructured computations. First, techniques for guiding prefetch instrumentation through runtime profile information will be studies to address unpredictable program behavior. Second, pointer prefetching techniques that aggressively schedule serialized memory operations will be developed to expose memory parallelism in pointer-intensive computations. Finally, "code-space" prefetch scheduling techniques will be investigated to enable prefetching along the multiple paths of execution commonly found in unstructured computations. In education, the topics and tools developed through research will be integrated into a curriculum that emphasized a "learn-by-doing" philosophy. In addition, undergraduate research programs and graduate student workshops will be created. Together, these education activities will produce students with a strong background in experimental systems.