Data Access and Communication

• The memory hierarchy (caches and main memory) plays a significant role in determining communication cost
  • May easily dominate the inherent communication of the algorithm
• For uniprocessor , the execution time of a program is given by useful work time + data access time
  • Useful work time is normally called the busy time or busy cycles
  • Data access time can be reduced either by architectural techniques (e.g., large caches) or by cache-aware algorithm design that exploits spatial and temporal locality

Data Access

• In multiprocessors
  • Every processor wants to see the memory interface as its own local cache and the main memory
  • In reality it is much more complicated
  • If the system has a centralized memory (e.g., SMPs), there are still caches of other processors; if the memory is distributed then some part of it is local and some is remote
  • For shared memory, data movement from local or remote memory to cache is transparent while for message passing it is explicit
  • View a multiprocessor as an extended memory hierarchy where the extension includes caches of other processors, remote memory modules and the network topology