WiSync: An architecture for fast synchronization through on-chip wireless communication

Sergi Abadal, Albert Cabellos-Aparicio, Eduard Alarcón, Josep Torrellas

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In shared-memory multiprocessing, fine-grain synchronization is challenging because it requires frequent communication. As technology scaling delivers larger manycore chips, such pattern is expected to remain costly to support. In this paper, we propose to address this challenge by using on-chip wireless communication. Each core has a transceiver and an antenna to communicate with all the other cores. This environment supports very low latency global communication. Our architecture, calledWiSync, uses a per-core Broadcast Memory (BM). When a core writes to its BM, all the other 100+ BMs get updated in less than 10 processor cycles. We also use a second wireless channel with cheaper transfers to execute barriers efficiently. WiSync supports multiprogramming, virtual memory, and context switching. Our evaluation with simulations of 128- threaded kernels and 64-threaded applications shows that WiSync speeds-up synchronization substantially. Compared to using advanced conventional synchronization,WiSync attains an average speedup of nearly one order of magnitude for the kernels, and 1.12 for PARSEC and SPLASH-2.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationASPLOS 2016 - 21st International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages3-17
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450340915
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 25 2016
Event21st International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2016 - Atlanta, United States
Duration: Apr 2 2016Apr 6 2016

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems - ASPLOS
Volume02-06-April-2016

Other

Other21st International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period4/2/164/6/16

Keywords

  • On-chip wireless communication
  • Synchronization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture

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