Bit-Plane Compression: Transforming Data for Better Compression in Many-Core Architectures

Abstract

As key applications become more data-intensive and the computational throughput of processors increases, the amount of data to be transferred in modern memory subsystems grows. Increasing physical bandwidth to keep up with the demand growth is challenging, however, due to strict area and energy limitations. This paper presents a novel and lightweight compression algorithm, Bit-Plane Compression (BPC), to increase the effective memory bandwidth. BPC aims at homogeneously-typed memory blocks, which are prevalent in many-core architectures, and applies a smart data transformation to both improve the inherent data compressibility and to reduce the complexity of compression hardware. We demonstrate that BPC provides superior compression ratios of 4.1:1 for integer benchmarks and reduces memory bandwidth requirements significantly.