Scratchpad Memory Management for Static Data Aggregates

Speaker: Lian Li

When: 10:00, Thursday 26th June 2008

Venue: 78-420

Abstract: Scratchpad memory (SPM) is a fast on-chip SRAM managed by software. Compared to traditional hardware managed cache, it is more efficient in performance, power and area-cost, and has the added advantage of better time predictability. Given these advantages, SPM is now used widely in many computing systems, including both embedded systems and some general-computing processors like the Cell Processor from IBM.

This talk will address the problem of automatic SPM management for static data aggregates, which is critical to the performance of SPM-based systems. We will show that the SPM management problem can be modeled as an interval coloring problem. Interval coloring is NP-complete. Therefore, in this talk, we also introduce two novel methodologies to solve the interval coloring problem and evaluate their efficiency and effectiveness against a set of embedded applications.

Bio: Lian Li is now a postdoc at Sun Labs, Brisbane. Before joining SUN, he got his PHD degree from UNSW in August, 2007 and has worked as a postdoc in UNSW for several months. His research interest is focused on Compiler Analysis and Optimizations, Embedded systems and Parallelization.

Hospitality: Cristina Cifuentes

Contact: Robert Colvin (SSE seminar co-ordinator) (robert@itee.uq.edu.au)

SSE seminar web page: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~sse/Seminars.html