Memory Performance and Bottlenecks in Multicore and GPU Architectures

Nowadays, there are several different architectures available not only for the industry, but also for normal consumers. Traditional multicore processors, GPUs, accelerators such as the Sunway SW26010, or even energy efficiency-driven processors such as the ARM family, present very different architectural characteristics. This wide range of characteristics presents a challenge for the developers of applications. Developers must deal with different instruction sets, memory hierarchies, or even different programming paradigms when programming for these architectures. Therefore, the same application can perform well when executing on one architecture, but poorly on another architecture. To optimize an application, it is important to have a deep understanding of how it behaves on different architectures. The related work in this area mostly focuses on a limited analysis encompassing execution time and energy. In this paper, we perform a detailed investigation on the impact of the memory subsystem of different architectures, which is one of the most important aspects to be considered. For this study, we performed experiments in the Broadwell CPU and Pascal GPU, using applications from the Rodinia benchmark suite. In this way, we were able to understand why an application performs well on one architecture and poorly on others.