Supporting I/O-intensive Workloads on the Cell Architecture
M. Mustafa Rafique, Ali Raza Butt, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos · Research Portal (Queen's University Belfast) · 2008
Recent advent of the asymmetric multi-core processors such as Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE) has popularized the use of heterogeneous architectures in High-End Computing. Data and I/O intensive workloads have largely been ignored in this domain. We take the first steps in supporting I/O intensive workloads on Cell and deriving some guidelines for optimizing the execution of I/O workloads on heterogeneous architectures. We explore various performance enhancing techniques for such workloads on an actual Cell/BE system. Among the techniques we explore, an asynchronous prefetching-based approach, which uses the PowerPC core of the Cell/BE for file prefetching and decentralized DMAs from the synergistic processing cores (SPE’s), improves the performance for I/O workloads that include an encryption/decryption component by 30.2%, compared to I/O performed naively from the SPE’s.