Abstract. Processor speed is improving at a faster rate than the speed of main memory, which makes memory accesses increasingly expensive. One way to solve this problem is to reduce miss ratio of the processor's last level cache by improving its replacement policy. We approach the problem by co-designing the runtime system and hardware and exploiting the semantics of the applications written in data-flow task-based programming models to provide hardware with information about the task types and task data-dependencies. We propose the Task-Type aware Insertion Policy, TTIP, which uses the runtime system to dynamically determine the best probability per task type for bimodal insertion in the recency stack and the static Dependency-Type aware Insertion Policy, DTIP, that inserts cache lines in the optimal position taking into account the dependency types of the current task. TTIP and DTIP perform similarly or better than state-of-the-art replacement policies, while requiring less hardware.

The ever-increasing gap between the processor and main memory speeds requires careful utilization of the limited memory link. This is additionally emphasized for the case of memory-bound applications. Prioritization of memory requests in the memory controller is one of the approaches to improve performance of such codes. However, current designs do not consider high-level information about parallel applications. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach to this problem, where the runtime system-level knowledge is made available in hardware. Processor exploits this information to better prioritize memory requests, while introducing negligible hardware cost. Our design is based on the notion of critical path in the execution of a parallel code. The critical tasks are accelerated by prioritizing their memory requests within the on-chip memory hierarchy. As a result, we reduce the critical path and improve the overall performance up to 1.19× compared to the baseline systems.

Reductions constitute a frequent algorithmic pattern in high-performance and scientific computing. Sophisticated techniques are needed to ensure their correct and scalable concurrent execution on modern processors. Reductions on large arrays represent the most demanding case where traditional approaches are not always applicable due to low performance scalability. To address these challenges, we propose RICH, a runtime-assisted solution that relies on architectural and parallel programming model extensions. RICH updates the reduction variable directly in the cache hierarchy with the help of added in-cache functional units. Our programming model extensions fit with the most relevant parallel programming solutions for shared memory environments like OpenMP. RICH does not modify the ISA, which allows the use of algorithms with reductions from pre-compiled external libraries. Experiments show that our solution achieves the speedup of 1.11× on average, compared to the state-of-the-art hardwarebased approaches, while it introduces 2.4% area and 3.8% power overhead. CCS CONCEPTS • Computer systems organization → Multicore architectures; • Computing methodologies → Parallel programming languages; • Software and its engineering → Runtime environments.