Memory Access Scheduling Schemes for Systems with Multi-Core Processors

On systems with multi-core processors, the memory access scheduling scheme plays an important role not only in utilizing the limited memory bandwidth but also in balancing the program execution on all cores. In this study, we propose a scheme, called ME-LREQ, which considers the utilization of both processor cores and memory subsystem. It takes into consideration both the long-term and short-term gains of serving a memory request by prioritizing requests hitting on the row buffers and from the cores that can utilize memory more efficiently and have fewer pending requests. We have also thoroughly evaluated a set of memory scheduling schemes that differentiate and prioritize requests from different cores. Our simulation results show that for memory-intensive, multiprogramming workloads, the new policy improves the overall performance by 10.7% on average and up to 17.7% on a four-core processor, when compared with scheme that serves row buffers hit memory requests first and allows memory reads bypassing writes; and by up to 9.2% (6.4% on average) when compared with the scheme that serves requests from the core with the fewest pending requests first.