Graduate Supervisory Committee:

Limited Local Memory (LLM) architectures are popular scalable memory multi-core architectures in which each core has a local software-controlled memory, e.g., the IBM Cell processor. While similar to the scratch pad memories (SPMs) in embedded systems, local memory architecture is different: instead of being in addition to the cached memory hier-archy, local memories are a part of the only memory hierarchy of the core. Consequently, different schemes of managing local memory are needed. The existing circular stack man-agement is a promising approach, but is only for extremely embedded applications, with constraints on the maximum stack size, and limited use of pointers. This research presents a generalized approach to manage the stack data of any application in a constant space on the local memory. The experimental results on benchmarks from MiBench running on the IBM Cell processor in Sony Playstation 3, show gains in programmability, and generalization without much loss of performance. ii