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Qi Guo, Tze-Meng Low, N. Alachiotis, Berkin Akin, Lawrence Pileggi, James C. Hoe and Franz Franchetti (Proc. MICRO, 2015)
Enabling Portable Energy Efficiency with Memory Accelerated Library
Preprint (637 KB)
Published paper (link to publisher)
Bibtex

Over the last decade, the looming power wall has spurred a flurry of interest in developing heterogeneous systems with hardware accelerators. The questions, then, are what and how accelerators should be designed, and what software support is required. Our accelerator design approach stems from the observation that many efficient and portable software implementations rely on high performance software libraries with well-established application programming interfaces (APIs). We propose the integration of hardware accelerators on 3D-stacked memory that explicitly targets the memory-bounded operations within high performance libraries. The fixed APIs with limited configurability simplify the design of the accelerators, while ensuring that the accelerators have wide applicability. With our software support that automatically converts library APIs to accelerator invocations, an additional advantage of our approach is that library-based legacy code automatically gains the benefit of memory-side accelerators without requiring a reimplementation. On average, the legacy code using our proposed MEmory Accelerated Library (MEALib) improves performance and energy efficiency for individual operations in Intel's Math Kernel Library (MKL) by 38x and 75x, respectively. For a real-world signal processing application that employs Intel MKL, MEALib attains more than 10x better energy efficiency.

Keywords:
Memory, Acceleration, Energy-efficient