Towards Efficient Control Flow Handling in Spatial Architecture via Architecting the Control Flow Plane
Jinyi Deng, Xinru Tang, Jiahao Zhang, Yuxuan Li, Linyun Zhang, Boxiao Han, Hongjun He, Fengbin Tu, Leibo Liu, Shaojun Wei, Yang Hu, Shouyi Yin · 2023
Spatial architecture is a high-performance architecture that uses control flow graphs and data flow graphs as the computational model and producer/consumer models as the execution models. However, existing spatial architectures suffer from control flow handling challenges. Upon categorizing their PE execution models, we find that they lack autonomous, peer-to-peer, and temporally loosely-coupled control flow handling capability. This leads to limited performance in intensive control programs.