DRAM Scheduling Policy for GPGPU Architectures Based on a Potential Function

Abstract

GPGPU architectures (applications) have several different characteristics compared to traditional CPU architectures (applications): highly multithreaded architectures and SIMD-execution behavior are the two important characteristics of GPGPU computing. In this paper, we propose a potential function that models the DRAM behavior in GPGPU architectures and a DRAM scheduling policy, alpha-SJF policy to minimize the potential function. The scheduling policy essentially chooses between SJF and FR-FCFS at run-time based on the number of requests from each thread and whether the thread has a row buffer hit.