Programming model for a heterogeneous x86 platform
Bratin Saha, Xiaocheng Zhou, Hu Chen, Ying Lian Gao, Shoumeng Yan, Mohan Rajagopalan, Jesse Fang, Peinan Zhang, Ronny Ronen, Avi Mendelson · 2009
The client computing platform is moving towards a heterogeneous architecture consisting of a combination of cores focused on scalar performance, and a set of throughput-oriented cores. The throughput oriented cores (e.g. a GPU) may be connected over both coherent and non-coherent interconnects, and have different ISAs. This paper describes a programming model for such heterogeneous platforms. We discuss the language constructs, runtime implementation, and the memory model for such a programming environment. We implemented this programming environment in a x86 heterogeneous platform simulator. We ported a number of workloads to our programming environment, and present the performance of our programming environment on these workloads.