Conflict-free data access for multi-bank memory architectures using padding

For high performance computation memory access is a major issue. Whether it is a supercomputer, a GPGPU device, or an Application Specific Instruction set Processor (ASIP) for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) parallel execution is a necessity. A high rate of computation puts pressure on the memory access, and it is often non-trivial to maximize the data rate to the execution units. Many algorithms that from a computational point of view can be implemented efficiently on parallel architectures fail to achieve significant speed-ups. The reason is very often that the speed-up possible with the available execution units are poorly utilized due to inefficient data access. This paper shows a method for improving the access time for sequences of data that are completely static at the cost of extra memory. This is done by resolving memory conflicts by using padding. The method can be automatically applied and it is shown to significantly reduce the data access time for sorting and FFTs. The execution time for the FFT is improved with up to a factor of 3.4 and for sorting by a factor of up to 8.