Squire: a general-purpose accelerator to exploit fine-grain parallelism on dependency-bound kernels

Langarita, Rubén ; Alastruey-Benedé, Jesús (Universidad de Zaragoza) ; Ibáñez-Marín, Pablo (Universidad de Zaragoza) ; Marco-Sola, Santiago ; Moretó, Miquel ; Armejach, Adrià

Resumen: Multiple HPC applications are often bottlenecked by compute-intensive kernels implementing complex dependency patterns (data-dependency bound). Traditional general-purpose accelerators struggle to effectively exploit fine-grain parallelism due to limitations in implementing convoluted data-dependency patterns (like SIMD) and overheads due to synchronization and data transfers (like GPGPUs). In contrast, custom FPGA and ASIC designs offer improved performance and energy efficiency at a high cost in hardware design and programming complexity and often lack the flexibility to process different workloads. We propose Squire, a general-purpose accelerator designed to exploit fine-grain parallelism effectively on dependency-bound kernels. Each Squire accelerator has a set of general-purpose low-power in-order cores that can rapidly communicate among themselves and directly access data from the L2 cache. Our proposal integrates one Squire accelerator per core in a typical multicore system, allowing the acceleration of dependency-bound kernels within parallel tasks with minimal software changes. As a case study, we evaluate Squire’s effectiveness by accelerating five kernels that implement complex dependency patterns. We use three of these kernels to build an end-to-end read-mapping tool that will be used to evaluate Squire. Squire obtains speedups up to 7.64× in dynamic programming kernels. Overall, Squire provides an acceleration for an end-to-end application of 3.66×. In addition, Squire reduces energy consumption by up to 56% with a minimal area overhead of 10.5% compared to a NeoverseN1 baseline.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.1109/PACT65351.2025.00035

Año: 2025

Publicado en: Proceedings of the Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (2025), 292-305
ISSN: 1089-795X

Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/AEI/PID2022-136454NB-C22
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/AEI/PID2023-146193OB-I00
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA/T58-23R
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICIU/PID2023-146511NB-I00

Tipo y forma: Congress (PostPrint)

Área (Departamento): Área Arquit.Tecnología Comput. (Dpto. Informát.Ingenie.Sistms.)