Dynamic Data Allocation and Task Scheduling on Multiprocessor Systems with NVM-Based SPM

Abstract

Low-power and short-latency memory access is critical to the performance of chip multiprocessor (CMP) system devices, especially to bridge the performance gap between memory and CPU. Together with increased demand for low-energy consumption and high-speed memory, scratch-pad memory (SPM) has been widely adopted in multiprocessor systems. In this paper, we employ a hybrid SPM, composed of a static random-access memory and a nonvolatile memory (NVM), to replace the cache in CMP. However, there are several challenges related to the CMP that need to be addressed, including how to dynamically assign processors to application tasks and dynamically allocate data to memories. To solve these problems based on this architecture, we propose a novel dynamic data allocation and task scheduling algorithm, i.e., dynamic greedy data allocation and task scheduling (DGDATS). Experiments on DSP benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms; namely, our proposed algorithm can generate a highly efficient dynamic data allocation and task scheduling approach to minimize the total execution cost and produce the least amount of write operations on NVMs. Our extensive simulation study demonstrates that our proposed algorithm exhibits an excellent performance compared with the heuristic allocation (HA) and adaptive genetic algorithm for data allocation (AGADA) algorithms. Based on the CMP systems with hybrid SPMs, DGDATS reduces the total execution cost by 22.18% and 51.37% compared with those of the HA and AGADA algorithms, respectively. Additionally, the average number of write operations on NVM is 19.82% lower than that of HA.