SDRAM-Energy-Aware memory allocation for dynamic multi-media applications on multi-processor platforms

Heterogeneous multi-processors platforms are an interesting option to satisfy the computational performance of dynamic multi-media applications at a reasonable energy cost. Today, almost no support exists to energy-efficiently manage the data of a multi-threaded application on these platforms. In this paper we show that the assignment of data of dynamically created/deleted tasks to the shared memory has a large impact on the energy consumption. We present two dynamic memory allocators which solve the bank assignment problem for shared multi-banked SDRAM memories. Both allocators assign the tasks' data to the available SDRAM banks such that the number of page-misses is reduced We have measured large energy savings with these allocators compared to existing dynamic memory allocators for several task-sets based on MediaBench.