Using data replication to reduce communication energy on chip multiprocessors

Chip multiprocessors are gaining popularity as they are very suitable for data-intensive embedded and high-end processing. In particular, array-intensive embedded image and video applications can benefit a lot from these architectures due to coarse-grain parallelization they offer. However, if not optimized, interprocessor communication can be a major energy consumer. Focusing on a distributed memory chip multiprocessor architecture and array-intensive embedded applications, this paper proposes a compiler-based communication minimization strategy based on data replication. The proposed scheme replicates shared data items across the memories of the processors in a controlled fashion (i.e., under a memory limit), with the goal of eliminating the otherwise necessary interprocessor communication.