A Double-Buffering Strategy for the SRF management in the Imagine Stream Processor

The stream register file (SRF) is a fast on-chip storage in the Imagine stream processor and its efficient management is essential for good performance. Double-buffering is an important strategy to manage the SRF efficiently. This paper introduces a double-buffering strategy which aims at reducing the overhead of double-buffering and the off-chip memory transfers. Compared with the current strategy for double-buffering, a new heuristic is proposed to determine the optimal buffer size and minimize the overhead of double-buffering. Besides, a reusing-first strategy is presented to reduce the off-chip memory transfers. Preliminary results over some stream programs show that our strategy represents a promising solution for double-buffering.