Qualcomm Incorporated

Fei Xu

Chun Yu

Alexei Vladimirovich Bourd

Swapnil Pradipkumar Sakharshete

Jian Liang

This disclosure describes techniques for supporting inter-task communication in a parallel computing system. The techniques for supporting inter-task communication may use hardware-based atomic operations to maintain the state of a pipe. A pipe may refer to a First-In, First-Out (FIFO)-organized buffer that allows various tasks to interact with the buffer as data producers or data consumers. Various pipe implementations may use multiple state parameters to define the state of a pipe. The hardware-based atomic operations described in this disclosure may modify multiple pipe state parameters in an atomic fashion. Modifying multiple pipe state parameters in an atomic fashion may avoid race conditions that would otherwise occur when multiple producers and/or multiple consumers attempt to modify the state of a pipe at the same time. In this way, pipe-based inter-task communication may be supported in a parallel computing system.

Hardware-based atomic operations for supporting inter-task communication

A cache memory system includes a cache memory including a plurality of cache memory lines and a dirty buffer including a plurality of dirty masks. A cache controller is configured to allocate one of the dirty masks to each of the cache memory lines when a write to the respective cache memory line is not a full write to that cache memory line. Each of the dirty masks indicates dirty states of data units in one of the cache memory lines. The cache controller may include a dirty buffer index which stores an identification (ID) information that associates the dirty masks with the cache memory lines to which the dirty masks are allocated. A cache line may include a fully dirty flag indicating when each byte in that cache line is dirty, so that a dirty mask does not need to be allocated for that cache line.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Fei Xu