Register File Energy Optimization for Snooping Based Clustered VLIW Architectures

Nagpal, Rahul and Srikant, YN (2007) Register File Energy Optimization for Snooping Based Clustered VLIW Architectures. In: 19th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing, 24-27 Oct. 2007 , Rio Grande do Sul .

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Abstract

Frequent accesses to the register file make it one of the major sources of energy consumption in ILP architectures. The large number of functional units connected to a large unified register file in VLIW architectures make power dissipation in the register file even worse because of the need for a large number of ports. High power dissipation in a relatively smaller area occupied by a register file leads to a high power density in the register file and makes it one of the prime hot-spots. This makes it highly susceptible to the possibility of a catastrophic heatstroke. This in turn impacts the performance and cost because of the need for periodic cool down and sophisticated packaging and cooling techniques respectively. Clustered VLIW architectures partition the register file among clusters of functional units and reduce the number of ports required thereby reducing the power dissipation. However, we observe that the aggregate accesses to register files in clustered VLIW architectures (and associated energy consumption) become very high compared to the centralized VLIW architectures and this can be attributed to a large number of explicit inter-cluster communications. Snooping based clustered VLIW architectures provide very limited but very fast way of inter-cluster communication by allowing some of the functional units to directly read some of the operands from the register file of some of the other clusters. In this paper, we propose instruction scheduling algorithms that exploit the limited snooping capability to reduce the register file energy consumption on an average by 12% and 18% and improve the overall performance by 5% and 11% for a 2-clustered and a 4-clustered machine respectively, over an earlier state-of-the-art clustered scheduling algorithm when evaluated in the context of snooping based clustered VLIW architectures.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	Copyright 2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation
Date Deposited:	17 Oct 2011 09:14
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2011 09:14
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/41484

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