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Motivation of stream processor Media-processing applications, such as 3-D polygon rendering, MPEG-2 encoding are becoming an increasingly dominant portion of computing workloads today Properties of media-processing applications Real-time performance constraints High arithmetic intensity require parallel solutions Inherently contain a large amount of data-parallelism Providing large numbers of ALUs to operate on data in parallel is relatively inexpensive Current programmable solutions cannot scale to support this many ALUs Both providing instructions and transferring data at the necessary rates are problematic. For example, a 48 ALU single-chip processor must issue up to 48 instructions/cycle and provide up to 144 words/cycle of data bandwidth to operate at peak rate.
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The Imagine Stream Processor
Ujval J. Kapasi, William J. Dally, Scott Rixner, John D. Owens, and Brucek Khailany
Presenter: Lu Hao
Contents
Stream processor Imagine Architecture Example: FFT application Experimental result Conclusion
Motivation of stream processor Media-processing applications, such as 3-D polygon rendering, M
PEG-2 encoding are becoming an increasingly dominant portion of computing workloads today
Properties of media-processing applications Real-time performance constraints High arithmetic intensity require parallel solutions Inherently contain a large amount of data-parallelism
Providing large numbers of ALUs to operate on data in parallel is relatively inexpensive
Current programmable solutions cannot scale to support this many ALUs Both providing instructions and transferring data at the necessary rates a
re problematic. For example, a 48 ALU single-chip processor must issue up to 48 instruc
tions/cycle and provide up to 144 words/cycle of data bandwidth to operate at peak rate.
What is a stream processor
Usually SIMD Allows some applications to more
easily exploit a limited form of parallel processing
Using the stream programming model to expose parallelism as well as producer-consumer locality
can use multiple computational units
The Imagine Processor
Imagine is a programmable stream processor and is a hardware implementation of the stream model.
Imagine is designed to be a stream coprocessor for a general purpose processor that acts as the host.
The programming model organizes the computation in an application into a sequence of arithmetic kernels, and organizes the data-flow into a series of data streams.
On a variety of realistic applications, Imagine can sustain up to 50 instructions per cycle, and up to 15 GOPS of arithmetic bandwidth.
Load-store architecture for streams (SRF)
Contents
Stream processor Imagine Architecture Example: FFT application Experimental result Conclusion
Architecture of Imagine 32 KW stream
register file (SRF) The microcontroller
keeps track of the program counter as it broadcasts each VLIW instruction to all eight clusters in a SIMD manner.
Each ALU cluster: six ALUs and 304 registers in several local register files (LRFs).
Architecture of Imagine
The SRF
The SRF
Clusters <---> SRF: data that needs to be passed from kernel to kernel
SRF <---> DRAM: part of truly global data structures
All stream operands originate in the SRF and stream results are stored back to the SRF.
Irregular stream locality converted to reuse through memory
Irregular producer-consumer locality captured at the SRF
Data distribution
Data distribution result
Architecture of Imagine
The ALU cluster
The ALU cluster256 x 32-bit register file
Contents
Stream processor Imagine Architecture Example: FFT application Experimental result Conclusion
Example: mapping of a 1024-point radix-2 FFT to the stream model
Contents
Stream processor Imagine Architecture Example: FFT application Experimental result Conclusion
Experimental Result
Speedup of 8 clusters over 1 cluster
Contents
Stream processor Imagine Architecture Example: FFT application Experimental result Conclusion
Conclusion
Stream processors are suitable for media-processing applications
Imagine exploits the data-level parallelism (DLP) in streams by executing a kernel on eight successive stream elements in parallel (one on each cluster). SRF ALU clusters
Application example: 1024pt FFT
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