Berti-Chip | Energy-Efficient Highly Accurate Data Prefetching

Summary
Data prefetchers are ubiquitous in current high-performance computers such as those manufactured by Intel, ARM, AMD, or IBM, as they play a fundamental role in hiding long-latency memory accesses. Prefetchers predict the data that will be needed by a processor in the future and fetch such data ahead of execution. State-of-the-art data prefetchers, push the limits of performance but often without caring about energy efficiency. The energy efficiency of a prefetcher is dictated by its accuracy, which measures the percentage of data moved by the prefetcher that satisfies the processor demands.

Berti is a data prefetcher sited at the first-level data cache (L1D) that makes a compelling case for timeliness and accuracy. Berti can boost processors performance by 33% (with respect to those not using prefetching mechanisms) and 8.5% (when compared to mainstream prefetchers) while providing an accuracy above 90%, which translates into a low energy overhead of the memory hierarchy. In addition, Berti is a cost-effective prefetcher that just requires 2.55KB of storage.

The objective of this project is to elaborate a hardware design for the Berti data prefetcher, as we strongly believe that the notable boost in processor performance and efficiency along with its design simplicity makes Berti a serious candidate both for the emerging low-power edge market and for high-performance computers.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101158023
Start date: 01-05-2024
End date: 31-10-2025
Total budget - Public funding: - 150 000,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

Data prefetchers are ubiquitous in current high-performance computers such as those manufactured by Intel, ARM, AMD, or IBM, as they play a fundamental role in hiding long-latency memory accesses. Prefetchers predict the data that will be needed by a processor in the future and fetch such data ahead of execution. State-of-the-art data prefetchers, push the limits of performance but often without caring about energy efficiency. The energy efficiency of a prefetcher is dictated by its accuracy, which measures the percentage of data moved by the prefetcher that satisfies the processor demands.

Berti is a data prefetcher sited at the first-level data cache (L1D) that makes a compelling case for timeliness and accuracy. Berti can boost processors performance by 33% (with respect to those not using prefetching mechanisms) and 8.5% (when compared to mainstream prefetchers) while providing an accuracy above 90%, which translates into a low energy overhead of the memory hierarchy. In addition, Berti is a cost-effective prefetcher that just requires 2.55KB of storage.

The objective of this project is to elaborate a hardware design for the Berti data prefetcher, as we strongly believe that the notable boost in processor performance and efficiency along with its design simplicity makes Berti a serious candidate both for the emerging low-power edge market and for high-performance computers.

Status

SIGNED

Call topic

ERC-2023-POC

Update Date

24-11-2024
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Horizon Europe
HORIZON.1 Excellent Science
HORIZON.1.1 European Research Council (ERC)
HORIZON.1.1.0 Cross-cutting call topics
ERC-2023-POC ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS
HORIZON.1.1.1 Frontier science
ERC-2023-POC ERC PROOF OF CONCEPT GRANTS