CeDMA: Enhancing Memory Efficiency of Heterogeneous Accelerator Systems Through Central DMA Controlling
摘要
As heterogeneous computing systems continue to evolve, emerging workloads increasingly span multiple types of accelerators, resulting in frequent inter-accelerator data transfers. However, traditional CPU-managed memory systems often struggle to coordinate these transfers efficiently, leading to high latency, poor memory bandwidth utilization, and scalability bottlenecks. We propose CeDMA, a centralized and programmable Direct Memory Access (DMA) control architecture that enables high-performance, CPU-decoupled memory coordination across diverse accelerators. CeDMA combines a unified hardware-software co-design: a modular DMA engine with integrated address translation and dual-level arbitration logic on the hardware side, and a lightweight instruction-driven memory management model with adaptive scheduling on the software side. CeDMA enables fine-grained control over memory transfers, minimizes off-chip bandwidth consumption, and exploits memory-level parallelism through dynamic resource partitioning. Cycle-accurate simulation results across a diverse workload suite—including GEMM, Conv2D, and graph traversal kernels—demonstrate up to 75% reduction in external memory access, 60% improvement in performance, and 45% reduction in access latency. Furthermore, CeDMA maintains high throughput and predictable latency at scale, supporting up to 32 concurrent accelerators. These results position CeDMA as a scalable, general-purpose memory management substrate for future heterogeneous SoC architectures.