Data-intensive applications and throughput-oriented processors demand more memory bandwidth. Memory compression can provide more data beyond physical limits, yet new data types and smaller block sizes are challenging. This paper presents a novel and lightweight memory compression framework, Multi-Prediction Compression (MPC), to increase the effective memory bandwidth. Based on multiple prediction models and data-driven algorithm tuning, MPC can provide 31.7% better compression than state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms for 32B blocks. Moreover, MPC is hardware-friendly and scalable to support a growing number of data patterns.

Heterogeneous computing relies on collaboration among different types of processors on shared data. In systems with discrete accelerators (e.g., GP-GPU), data sharing requires transferring a large amount of data between CPU and accelerator memories and can significantly increase the end-toend execution time. This paper proposes a novel mechanism called Demand MemCpy (DMC) to hide the data sharing overheads. DMC copies data from host memory to accelerator memory based on demands at page granularity. It utilizes a hardware-only mechanism to fetch the requested page with a short latency and the background pre-copy to fetch related pages in advance. Our evaluation shows that DMC can reduce the end-to-end execution time of GP-GPU application by 25.4% on average by overlapping computation with data transfer and not transferring unused pages.

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