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                   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                                       
                      Computer Science Department
                                       
                          C O L L O Q U I U M

                  Predictability of Access Patterns for 
                  Scientific and Commercial Applications

                         Leonidas Kontothanassis

                                Akamai

                            Monday, March 26
			       11:00 am
                       (Coffee served at 10:45PM)

                         Seminar Room / MCS 135


Large-scale cache coherent multiprocessors based on directories face
the challenge of high memory-access latencies.  Most systems attempt
to mitigate the impact of memory latency via the use of caches but
certain data-access latencies are intrinsic in the applications and
reflect communication between the processors performing the
computation.  Such latencies can only be addressed by prediction
mechanisms that try to anticipate high latency operations and initiate
them before the actual data is needed.  In this talk, we examine both
address-space and PC-space hardware prediction schemes that try to
minimize two types of latencies present in parallel applications:
upgrades to shared data, and requests to remotely modified data.  We
evaluate these schemes on a large variety of scientific and commercial
applications and we find that their success depends heavily on the
application domain.  The techniques we study show good behavior for
scientific applications but more work is required before such
prediction schemes can be successful for the commercial application
domain.

Host: Azer Bestavros
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