Impulse : An Adaptable Memory System

This paper presents the Impulse adaptable memory system, which allows applications to make efficient use of cache space and bus bandwidth. Impulse has a configurable memory controller that allows applications to remap data in the memory system. As a result, applications can control how their data is accessed, organized, and cached. We describe the current design of the Impulse architecture, describe the software transformations that will be necessary to make full use of Impulse, and examine in detail the optimizations that Impulse enables: scatter/gather access to sparse data, no-copy page coloring, and no-copy tile remapping. Results of a simulation study show that Impulse can improve the performance of conjugate gradient by 30%.