Mobile Memory: Improving memory locality in very large reconfigurable fabrics

Abstract

As the size of reconfigurable fabrics increases we can envision entire applications being mapped to a reconfigurable device; not just the code, but also the memory. These larger circuits, unfortunately, will suffer from the problem of a growing memory bottleneck. In this paper we explore how mobile memory techniques, inspired by cache-only memory architectures, can be applied to help solve this problem. The basic idea is to move the memory to the location of the accessor. Using both an analytical model and simulation we investigate several different memory movement algorithms. The results show that mobility can, on average, decrease memory latency 2x; which translates into speedup of about 15%.