Core-aware memory access scheduling schemes

Multi-core processors have changed the conventional hardware structure and require a rethinking of system scheduling and resource management to utilize them efficiently. However, current multi-core systems are still using conventional single-core memory scheduling. In this study, we investigate and evaluate traditional memory access scheduling techniques, and propose a core-aware memory scheduling for multi-core environments. Since memory requests from the same source exhibit better locality, it is reasonable to schedule the requests by taking the source of the requests into consideration. Motivated from this principle of locality, we propose two core-aware policies based on traditional bank-first and row-first schemes. Simulation results show that the core-aware policies can effectively improve the performance. Compared with the bank-first and row-first policies, the proposed core-aware policies reduce the execution time of certain NAS parallel benchmarks by up to 20% in running the benchmarks separately, and by 11% in running them concurrently.