Title: Hardware support for thread synchronisation in an experimental manycore system

Authors: Alessandro Cilardo; Mirko Gagliardi; Daniele Passaretti

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy ' Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of thread synchronisation in manycore systems. In particular, it considers the open-source GPU-like architecture developed within the MANGO H2020 project. The thread synchronisation hardware relies on a distributed master and on a lightweight control unit to be deployed within the core. It does not rely on memory access for exchanging synchronisation information since it uses hardware-level messages. The solution supports multiple barriers for different application kernels possibly being executed simultaneously. The results for different NoC sizes provide indications about the reduced synchronisation times and area overheads incurred by our solution.

Keywords: accelerators; manycore systems; synchronisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2020.103970

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2020 Vol.11 No.1, pp.62 - 71

Received: 15 Feb 2018
Accepted: 18 Oct 2018

Published online: 04 Dec 2019 *

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