An MIT professor has conducted some handy research that could help make applications run faster and use less energy by overcoming an inherent drawback of multicore processors. The problem is that although the local caches on chips save them the latency of having to access RAM, the hardware-wired algorithms powering them often assign data to cache locations randomly without considering the core trying to access it. The new software-based technique, called Jigsaw, tracks which cores are accessing what data — and how much — and assigns data locale accordingly. The paper detailing Jigsaw is available here.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013
- Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
- The importance of putting the U and I in visualization