Balanced systems: A new approach to integrate hardware and software design

Abstract

The runtime gain to be obtained by integrating hardware and software design is substantial. E.g. in memory hierarchies, in particular in caches, performance increases of typically 20% could be observed for a wide selection of workloads. These performance increases have been acquired in a first step without using knowledge about program behavior. Higher benefits can be expected for a specifically designed algorithm.

In the project “Balanced Systems” a prototype is developed which uses knowledge about program behavior. Based upon reorganization of code and data a tool will be implemented providing a cache optimized link order of the program modules. Extending this tool to the optimization of procedures will lead to further performance increases due to finer granularity of the reorganized units. This adaption can be done without changing the reorganization algorithm. Only a new backend controlling procedures instead of link modules has to be implemented.

The prototype is based on a standard file format. Therefore it is portable to different UNIX systems. The optimization strategy is independent of the underlying computer architecture and can be successfully applied to all cache oriented RISC and CISC systems.