Digital signal and multimedia processing become increasingly popular in many microprocessor applications. Today, almost all the commercial processors, from ARM to Pentium, have some types of media enhancement hardware. While there has been much work studying memory behavior and performance for general integer and large-scale scientific applications, this proposed research will focus on the needs for multimedia applications.
The memory reference behavior of multimedia applications is complicated by the fact that general-purpose processors have begun to support multithreading capability to improve throughput and hardware utilization. The new Hyper-Threading technology brings the multithreading idea into Intel Architecture to make a single physical processor appear as two logical processors. Active threads have their own local states, such as Program Counter (PC), register file, and thread status word, while share other expensive hardware, such as functional units and caches. When multiple threads are running in parallel on a multithreaded processor, their memory behavior can be either constructive or disruptive. The memory behavior is constructive when multiple threads share the data that was brought in by one or another. The memory behavior is disruptive when multiple threads have their own distinct working set and complete with the limited memory hierarchy resources.
We will use Simics, a full-system simulator, capable of simulating multiprocessor/multithread applications for this project. Simics is a system-level architecture simulator that is capable of running unmodified commercial operating system and applications. The host and target operating systems can be Windows or Linux. A consistent environment will be established between Intel and Dr. Peir's lab. We will collaborate with Intel's China Research Center (ICRC) and the Graphics and Media Lab at Intel's Microprocessor Research (MRL). We will study several multithreaded media workloads that are parallelized with Intel's OpenMP Compiler.
Acknowledgement: This research project uses Simics - whole system simulation tool from Virtutech for conducting performance evaluation. Visit Virtutech Website for obtaining academic Simics license .