A Characterization of High Performance DSP Kernels on the TRIPS Architecture

Diminishing performance gains in conventional architectures are fueling novel designs which more effectively extract parallelism and have the potential to change the nature of architectural bottlenecks. Consequently, workload characterization is of a growing importance in the design of modern high performance computing architectures. However, the accurate performance evaluation necessary for workload characterization can be prohibitively constrained by immature compilers. In this paper, we present a workload characterization for High Performance Digital Signal Processing (HP-DSP) applications on the TRIPS architecture. Included is a bottleneck analysis of this novel next-generation architecture and a discussion of our evaluation methodology. Using a combination of hand and machine optimization techniques we succesfuly characterize the workload of the TRIPS architecture on HP-DSP applications under the constraint of a developing compiler. This detailed performance characterization illustrates the potential of HP-DSP applications to successfully map to highly concurrent hardware and discusses bottlenecks unique to the TRIPS architecture.