16th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD'04)
The eDRAM based L3-Cache of the BlueGene/L Supercomputer Processor Node
Foz do Igua?u, PR - Brazil
October 27-October 29
ISBN: 0-7695-2240-8
BlueGene/L is a supercomputer consisting of 64K dual-processor system-on-a-chip compute nodes, capable of delivering an arithmetic peak performance of 5.6Gflops per node. To match the memory speed to the high compute performance, the system implements an aggressive three-level on-chip cache hierarchy for each node. The implemented hierarchy offers high bandwidth and integrated prefetching on cache hierarchy levels 2 and 3 to reduce memory access time. The integrated L3-cache stores a total of 4MB of data, using multi-bank embedded DRAM. The 1024 bit wide data port of the embedded DRAM provides 22.4GB/s bandwidth to serve the speculative prefetching demands of the two processor cores and the Gigabit Ethernet DMA engine.
Citation:
Martin Ohmacht, Dirk Hoenicke, Ruud Haring, Alan Gara, "The eDRAM based L3-Cache of the BlueGene/L Supercomputer Processor Node," sbac-pad, pp.18-22, 16th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD'04), 2004