Remote store programming: A memory model for embedded multicore

Abstract

This paper presents remote store programming (RSP), a programming paradigm which combines usability and efficiency through the exploitation of a simple hardware mechanism, the remote store, which can easily be added to existing multicores. The RSP model and its hardware implementation trade a relatively high store latency for a low load latency because loads are more common than stores, and it is easier to tolerate store latency than load latency. This paper demonstrates the performance advantages of remote store programming by comparing it to cache-coherent shared memory (CCSM) for several important embedded benchmarks using the TILEPro64 processor. RSP is shown to be faster than CCSM for all eight benchmarks using 64 cores. For five of the eight benchmarks, RSP is shown to be more than 1.5 × faster than CCSM. For a 2D FFT implemented on 64 cores, RSP is over 3 × faster than CCSM. RSP's features, performance, and hardware simplicity make it well suited to the embedded processing domain. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.