Efficient LU Factorization for Texas Instruments Keystone Architecture Digital Signal Processors

Abstract: The energy consumption of large-scale high-performance computer (HPC) systems has become one of the foremost concerns of both data-center operators and computer manufacturers. This has renewed interest in alternative computer architectures that could offer substantially better energy-efficiency.Yet, the for the evaluation of the potential of these architectures necessary well-optimized implementations of typical HPC benchmarks are often not available for these for the HPC industry novel architectures. The in this work presented LU factorization benchmark implementation aims to provide such a high-quality tool for the HPC industry standard high-performance LINPACK benchmark (HPL) for the eight-core Texas Instruments TMS320C6678 digitalsignal processor (DSP). The presented implementation could perform the LU factorization at up to 30.9 GF/s at 1.25 GHz core clock frequency by using all the eight DSP cores of the System-on-Chip (SoC). This is 77% of the attainable peak double-precision floating-point performance of the DSP, a level of efficiency that is comparable to the efficiency expected on traditional x86-based processor architectures. A presented detailed performance analysis shows that this is largely due to the optimized implementation of the embedded generalized matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM). For this operation, the on-chip direct memory access (DMA) engines were used to transfer the necessary data from the external DDR3 memory to the core-private and shared scratchpad memory. This allowed to overlap the data transfer with computations on the DSP cores. The computations were in turn optimized by using software pipeline techniques and were partly implemented in assembly language. With these optimization the performance of the matrix multiplication reached up to 95% of attainable peak performance. A detailed description of these two key optimization techniques and their application to the LU factorization is included. Using a specially instrumented Advantech TMDXEVM6678L evaluation module, described in detail in related work, allowed to measure the SoC’s energy efficiency of up to 2.92 GF/J while executing the presented benchmark. Results from the verification of the benchmark execution using standard HPL correctness checks and an uncertainty analysis of the experimentally gathered data are also presented.