Mitosis: A speculative multithreaded processor based on pre-computation slices

This paper presents the Mitosis framework, which is a combined hardware-software approach to speculative multithreading, even in the presence of frequent dependences among threads. Speculative multithreading increases single-threaded application performance by exploiting thread-level parallelism spe...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Madriles Gimeno, Carles, García Quiñones, Carlos, Sánchez, Jesús, Marcuello, Pedro, González Colás, Antonio María|||0000-0002-0009-0996, Tullsen, Dean, Wang, Hong, Shen, John P.
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2008
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/100454
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/100454
https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2007.70797
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Compilers (Computer programs)
Cache memory
Speculative thread-level parallelism
Precomputation slices
Thread partitioning
Multicore architecture
Compiladors (Programes d'ordinador)
Memòria cau
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Arquitectura de computadors
Descrição
Resumo:This paper presents the Mitosis framework, which is a combined hardware-software approach to speculative multithreading, even in the presence of frequent dependences among threads. Speculative multithreading increases single-threaded application performance by exploiting thread-level parallelism speculatively, that is, executing code in parallel, even when the compiler or runtime system cannot guarantee that the parallelism exists. The proposed approach is based on predicting/computing thread input values via software through a piece of code that is added at the beginning of each thread (the precomputation slice). A precomputation slice is expected to compute the correct thread input values most of the time but not necessarily always. This allows aggressive optimization techniques to be applied to the slice to make it very short. This paper focuses on the microarchitecture that supports this execution model. The primary novelty of the microarchitecture is the hardware support for the execution and validation of precomputation slices. Additionally, this paper presents new architectures for the register file and the cache memory in order to support multiple versions of each variable and allow for efficient rollback in case of misspeculation. We show that the proposed microarchitecture, together with the compiler support, achieves an average speedup of 2.2 for applications that conventional nonspeculative approaches are not able to parallelize at all.