Fine-Grain Priority Scheduling on Multi-Channel Memory Systems

Configurations of contemporary DRAM memory systems become increasingly complex. A recent study [5] shows that application performance is highly sensitive to choices of configurations, and suggests that tuning burst sizes and channel configurations be an effective way to optimize the DRAM performance for a given memory-intensive workload. However, this approach is workload dependent. In this study we show that, by utilizing fine-grain priority access scheduling, we are able to find a workload independent configuration that achieves optimal performance on a multichannel memory system. Our approach can well utilize the available high concurrency and high bandwidth on such memory systems, and effectively reduce the memory stall time of memory-intensive applications. Conducting execution-driven simulation of a 4-way issue, 2 GHz processor, we show that the average performance improvement for fifteen memory-intensive SPEC2000 programs by using an optimized fine-grain priority sched...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Zhichun Zhu, Zhao Zhang, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Average Performance Improvement, DRAM Memory Systems, HPCA 2002, Memory Systems