Uppsala Architecture Research Team

Bandwidth Bandit: Quantitative Characterization of Memory Contention

The Bandwidth Bandit steals system bandwidth by accessing data in carefully chosen sequential and random access patterns that avoid polluting the cache hierarchy. (E.g., we design the pattern to ensure that we only use a very limited number of sets in the cache.) This work demonstrates that there is little correlation between bandwidth consumption and sensitivity, by quantitatively analyze whether an application is latency sensitive (e.g., slows down as soon as there is any bandwidth contention) or bandwidth sensitive (e.g., only slows down when bandwidth is exhausted).

Using Bandit Data to predict multicore scaling for bandwidth-bound applications. Poster

• Bandwidth Bandit: Quantitative Characterization of Memory Contention. David Eklöv, Nikos Nikoleris, David Black-Schaffer, and Erik Hagersten. In Proc. 11th International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization: CGO 2013, pp 99-108, IEEE Computer Society, 2013. (DOI).
• Bandwidth bandit: Quantitative characterization of memory contention. David Eklöv, Nikkos Nikoleris, David Black-Schaffer, and Erik Hägersten. In Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques - Conference Proceedings, PACT, pp 457-458, 2012. (DOI).