Active memory operations
Zhen Fang, Lixin Zhang, John B. Carter, Ali R. Ibrahim, Michael Allen Parker · 2007
The performance of modern microprocessors is increasingly limited by their inability to hide main memory latency. The problem is worse in large-scale shared memory systems, where remote memory latencies are hundreds, and soon thousands, of processor cycles. To mitigate this problem, we propose the use of Active Memory Operations (AMOs), in which select operations can be sent to and executed on the home memory controller of data. AMOs can eliminate significant number of coherence messages, minimize intranode and internode memory traffic, and create opportunities for parallelism. Our implementation of AMOs is cache-coherent and requires no changes to the processor core or DRAM chips.