Efficient memory copy operations on the 48-core Intel SCC processor
M.W. van Tol, Roy Bakker, Merijn Verstraaten, Clemens Grelck, CHRIS R. JESSHOPE · UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) · 2011
The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is a 48core experimental processor created by Intel Labs targeting the many-core research community.It has hardware support for sending short messages between cores, while large messages have to go through off-chip shared memory.However, memory copy operations on this chip are expensive and inefficient.In this paper we provide insight in the SCC's memory architecture and describe and evaluate a few memory copy methods.We propose a novel method, unique to the SCC, which we believe achieves the maximum possible throughput for a single core on this chip.In order to efficiently implement this approach we introduce dedicated cores that run a memory copy service which can be used asynchronously by other cores.