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Demands for low-energy microcontrollers have been increasing in recent years. Since most microcontrollers achieve user programmability by integrating nonvolatile (NV) memories such as flash memories for storing their programs, the large power consumption required in accessing an NV memory has become a major problem. This problem becomes critical when the power supply voltage of NV microcontrollers is decreased. We can solve this problem by introducing an instruction cache, thus reducing the access frequency of the NV memory. Unlike general-purpose microprocessors, microcontrollers used for real-time applications in embedded systems must accurately calculate program execution time prior to its execution. Therefore, we introduce a "transparent" instruction cache, which does not change the existing NV microcontroller's cycle-level execution time, for reducing power and energy consumption, but not for improving the processing speed. We have conducted detailed microar chitecture design based on the architecture of a major industrial microcontroller, and we evaluated power and energy consumption for several benchmark programs. Our evaluation shows that the proposed instruction cache can successfully reduce energy consumption in a fairly wide range of practical NV microcontroller configurations.

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Abstract:Memcached has been widely accepted as a technology to improve the response speed of web servers by caching data on DRAMs in distributed servers. Because of its importance, the acceleration of memcached has been studied on various platforms. Among them, FPGA looks the most attractive platform to run memcached, and several research groups have tried to obtain a much higher performance than that of CPU out of it. The difficulty encountered there, however, is how to manage large-sized memory (gigabytes of DRAMs) from memcached hardware built in an FPGA. Some groups are trying to solve this problem by using an embedded CPU for memory allocation and another group is employing an SSD. Unlike other approaches that try to replace memcached itself on FPGAs, our approach augments the software memcached running on the host CPU by caching its data and some operations at the FPGAequipped network interface card (NIC) mounted on the server. The locality of memcached data enables the FPGA NIC to have a fairly high hit rate with a smaller memory. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the proposed NIC cache, and evaluate the effectiveness with a standard key-value store (KVS) benchmarking tool. Our evaluation shows that our system is effective if the workload has temporal locality but does not handle workloads well without such a characteristic. We further propose methods to overcome this problem and evaluate them. As a result, we estimate that the latency improved by up to 3.5 times over software memcached running on a high performance CPU.

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