用强化学习协同调度预取与离片预测,提升高性能处理器内存性能。
Athena: Synergizing Data Prefetching and Off-Chip Prediction via Online Reinforcement Learning
- 将预取器与离片预测器的协调建模为强化学习问题,自动决策开启与调节策略。
- 在多种配置下相比现有方法平均提升12.3%性能,且存储开销小。
- 适合关注内存延迟隐藏的处理器设计者和系统优化研究者。
预取与离片预测(OCP)是缓解高性能处理器长内存访问延迟的两种技术。本文发现:(1) 二者常带来互补性能增益,(2) 简单组合难以发挥全部潜力,(3) 现有预取控制策略仍有显著优化空间。为此,我们提出Athena框架,通过在线强化学习(RL)自主协调多级缓存中的多个预取器与离片预测器。Athena作为智能体,在程序执行周期内观察系统特征(如预取/预测准确率、带宽使用),据此选择是否启用或调整预取器与OCP。每个周期结束时,根据系统指标变化(如执行周期数)获得奖励,持续优化协调策略。在多样化内存密集型工作负载上的评估表明,Athena在不同配置下均显著优于当前最优协调策略,平均性能提升12.3%,且仅引入轻微存储开销。代码开源:https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Athena。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Prefetching and off-chip prediction are two techniques proposed to hide long memory access latencies in high-performance processors. In this work, we demonstrate that: (1) prefetching and off-chip prediction often provide complementary performance benefits, yet (2) naively combining them often fails to realize their full performance potential, and (3) existing prefetcher control policies leave significant room for performance improvement behind. Our goal is to design a holistic framework that can autonomously learn to coordinate an off-chip predictor with multiple prefetchers employed at various cache levels. To this end, we propose a new technique called Athena, which models the coordination between prefetchers and off-chip predictor (OCP) as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. Athena acts as the RL agent that observes multiple system-level features (e.g., prefetcher/OCP accuracy, bandwidth usage) over an epoch of program execution, and uses them as state information to select a coordination action (i.e., enabling the prefetcher and/or OCP, and adjusting prefetcher aggressiveness). At the end of every epoch, Athena receives a numerical reward that measures the change in multiple system-level metrics (e.g., number of cycles taken to execute an epoch). Athena uses this reward to autonomously and continuously learn a policy to coordinate prefetchers with OCP. Our extensive evaluation using a diverse set of memory-intensive workloads shows that Athena consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art coordination policies across a wide range of system configurations with various combinations of underlying prefetchers, OCPs, and main memory bandwidths, while incurring only modest storage overhead. Athena is freely available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Athena.
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