[comp.arch] Was: RISC is a nasty no-no! Mor

grunwald@uiucdcsm.cs.uiuc.edu (03/09/88)

re: address hashing to randomize bank conflicts.

I would think that this would be too slow in software. However, if I recall
correctly, randomized hashing was done in hardware on the RP-3 (it had some
sort of variable hashing so you could fiddle with the parameters).

brooks@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Eugene D. Brooks III) (03/10/88)

In article <3300021@uiucdcsm> grunwald@uiucdcsm.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>re: address hashing to randomize bank conflicts.
>
>I would think that this would be too slow in software. However, if I recall
>correctly, randomized hashing was done in hardware on the RP-3 (it had some
>sort of variable hashing so you could fiddle with the parameters).

Those who have been using supercomputers for the past decade have dealt
with this sort of problem by carefully avoiding the undesired addressing
modes.  Hashing takes care of the few pathological cases by slowing down
the majority of cases which would normally stream at one word per clock.
To slow down the machine to "random gather" speed for all of the normally
high performance situtations is not desired.  This applies to shared memory
multiprocessors as well as it does to single cpu supercomputers.

lawrie@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu (03/10/88)

I think I recall early versions of CHOPPS randomized addresses, and
Klapholtz wrote  >=one paper about this.  Was also
proposed for Cedar at Illinois but was not implemented
at least in the first versions for reasons of economy.