A Quantitative Comparison of PRAM based Emulated Shared Memory Architectures to Current Multicore CPUs and GPUs

Abstract

The performance of current multicore CPUs and GPUs is limited in computations making frequent use of communication/synchronization between the subtasks executed in parallel. This is because the directory-based cache systems scale weakly and/or the cost of synchronization is high. The Emulated Shared Memory (ESM) architectures relying on multithreading and efficient synchronization mechanisms have been developed to solve these problems affecting both performance and programmability of current machines. In this paper, we compare preliminarily the performance of three hardware implemented ESM architectures with state-of-the-art multicore CPUs and GPUs. The benchmarks are selected to cover different patterns of parallel computation and therefore reveal the performance potential of ESM architectures with respect to current multicores.