• Smart Media Journal
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.33-38
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• 2014

Even though the performance of microprocessor is improved continuously, the performance improvement of computing system becomes hard to increase, in order to some drawbacks including increased power consumption. To solve the problem, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units(GPGPUs), which execute general-purpose applications by using specialized parallel-processing device representing graphics processing units(GPUs), have been focused. However, the characteristics of applications related with graphics is substantially different from the characteristics of general-purpose applications. Therefore, GPUs cannot exploit the outstanding computational resources sufficiently due to various constraints, when they execute general-purpose applications. When designing GPUs for GPGPU, memory system is important to effectively exploit the GPUs since typically general-purpose applications requires more memory accesses than graphics applications. Especially, external memory access requiring long latency impose a big overhead on the performance of GPUs. Therefore, the GPU performance must be improved if hierarchical memory architecture which can reduce the number of external memory access is applied. For this reason, we will investigate the analysis of GPU performance according to hierarchical cache architectures in executing various benchmarks.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.1282-1295
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• 1994

In this paper, a hierarchical cluster multiprocessor system based on a hierarchical bus system is proposed and its cache coherency protocol is designed and implemented. The hierarchical cluster architecture aims at elimination the system bottleneck of the existing single bus system by adding a hierarchy of buses as the number of clusters is increased. Therefore the system is easy to scale up to a large number of processors. The proposed cache protocol is designed to be adapted to the general N-level (N>2) hierarchical cluster architecture. The original pended protocol is extended to implement the cache protocol on the system bus and cache coherency operations for this protocol are explained.