Gather/scatter hardware support for accelerating Fast Fourier Transform

As we enter the multi-core era, seeking methods to boost the performance of single-threaded applications remains critical. Achieving gains in processor performance by increasing the operating frequency has begun to meet more obstacles. However, significant performance improvements can be achieved by extending the capability of the processor with the addition of hardware support, which makes much more effective use of the available transistors. This paper presents a novel hardware support called, DistTree, to speed up processor performance. The DistTree hardware automates gather and scatter operations for applications with complex but predictable memory access patterns like the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). With this hardware support integrated with a modern microprocessor (the Alpha architecture in our experiments), the FFT performance can reap a more than twofold increase when compared against the FFTW library, a state-of-the-art implementation. The DistTree hardware support enables the processor to spend the majority of processor cycles on executing the computations of an algorithm by reducing both the arithmetic and address computation overhead. Therefore, the performance of many single-threaded applications can be significantly increased.