Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering

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CS590 SEMINAR

 

Software Support for Domain-Specific Processors used in Graph Applications

 

Mehmetali Semi Yenimol
MS Student
(Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Özcan Öztürk)
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University

General-purpose processor architectures suffer from the poor spatial and temporal locality in many graph analytic applications. Due to the nature of these applications, they cannot utilize the available caches caused by random memory accesses. Domain-specific processor architectures can be proposed to mitigate this problem, which relies on using a software-controllable cache design called Scratch-pad Memory (SPM) along with some additional custom instructions. Even though such processors suggest improvements on the performance of graph applications, the programmer must be aware of the low-level details of the architectures to effectively make use of them. This work focuses on providing compiler support for such architectures as well as providing a software library to effectively utilize the SPM. Compiler support is based on the static analysis of a given program and provides a user-friendly programming environment, yet efficiency is limited by the design of the program itself. In this implementation, the software library uses the Gather-Apply-Scatter (GAS) programming paradigm which inherently manages SPM independent of the application

 

DATE: 02 December 2020, Wednesday @ 13:35