Optimized selection of runtime mode for the reconfigurable pram-numa architecture replica using machine-learning

Abstract

The massively hardware multithreaded VLIW emulated shared memory (ESM) architecture REPLICA has a dynamically reconfigurable on-chip network that offers two execution modes: PRAM and NUMA. PRAM mode is mainly suitable for applications with high amount of thread level parallelism (TLP) while NUMA mode is mainly for accelerating execution of sequential programs or programs with low TLP. Also, some types of regular data parallel algorithms execute faster in NUMA mode. It is not obvious in which mode a given program region shows the best performance. In this study we focus on generic stencil-like computations exhibiting regular control flow and memory access pattern. We use two state-of-the art machine-learning methods, C5.0 (decision trees) and Eureqa Pro (symbolic regression) to select which mode to use.We use these methods to derive different predictors based on the same training data and compare their results. The accuracy of the best derived predictors are 95% and are generated by both C5.0 and Eureqa Pro, although the latter can in some cases be more sensitive to the training data. The average speedup gained due to mode switching ranges between 1.92 to 2.23 for all generated predictors on the evaluation test cases, and using a majority voting algorithm, based on the three best predictors, we can eliminate all misclassifications.