A week further on and not much C++ has been written – and now I think I need to make a new start.
Up to this point I have been trying to write a software model of the hardware and my thought was I could think put a software-modelling layer on top of that. But that simply is not going to work – it is just too complex.
Instead I am going to have to make some policy decisions in the software – essentially over how I model the local memory on the chip: each tile will process memory reads and writes and needs to know where that memory is – it could be in the global off-chip memory store or it could be on-chip.
The difference matters because, at least in theory, the on-chip memory is speedily accessible, while the off-chip memory is 50 to 100 to 500 times “further away”. Because memory accesses exhibit locality it makes sense to ship blocks of addressed memory from the global to the local store – but doing so takes time and if there are a lot of memory movements then we get thrashing.
What I now have to do is think of what policy I will use to decide what memory gets stored locally (or, more likely, what policy I use to map the addresses). I’ll start by once again reviewing papers that propose some schemes for existing Networks-on-Chip.
In other news: I have had a paper (of which I am co-author and first named author) accepted by OSPERTS 15 – so I will be off to Sweden to get mauled by the audience there in early July. It will be an experience, and I am looking forward to it, but I also think it might be not so much a baptism, but a destruction by fire.
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 