Buffer Allocation Based On-Chip Memory Optimization for Many-Core Platforms

Abstract

The problem of finding an optimal allocation of logical data buffers to memory has emerged as a new research challenge due to the increased complexity of applications and new emerging Dynamic RAM (DRAM) interface technologies. This new opportunity of a large off-chip memory accessible by an ample bandwidth allows to reduce the on-chip Static RAM (SRAM) significantly and save production cost of future manycore platforms. We thus propose changes to an existing work that allows to uniformly reduce the on-chip memory size for a given application. We additionally introduce a novel linear programming model to automatically generate all necessary on chip memory sizes for a given application based on an optimal allocation of data buffers. An extension allows to further reduce the required on-chip memory in multi-application scenarios. We conduct a case study to validate all our models and show the applicability of our approach.