Paper Info
Title
Tolerating memory latency through software-controlled pre-execution in simultaneous multithreading processors
Abstract
Hardly predictable data addresses in many irregular applications have rendered prefetching ineffective. In many cases, the only accurate way to predict these addresses is to directly execute the code that generates them. As multithreaded architectures become increasingly popular, one attractive approach is to use idle threads on these machines to perform pre-execution—essentially a combined act of speculative address generation and prefetching—to accelerate the main thread. In this paper, we propose such a pre-execution technique for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processors. By using software to control pre-execution, we are able to handle some of the most important access patterns that are typically difficult to prefetch. Compared with existing work on pre-execution, our technique is significantly simpler to implement (e.g., no integration of pre-execution results, no need of shortening programs for pre-execution, and no need of special hardware to copy register values upon thread spawns). Consequently, only minimal extensions to SMT machines are required to support our technique. Despite its simplicity, our technique offers an average speedup of 24% in a set of irregular applications, which is a 19% speedup over state-of-the-art software-controlled prefetching.
Year
DOI
Venue
2001
10.1145/379240.379250
ISCA '08 Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
computer architecture,acceleration,multi threading,multithreading,application software,simultaneous multithreading,hardware,memory latency
Multithreading,Runahead,Computer science,Parallel computing,Speculative multithreading,Thread (computing),Real-time computing,Simultaneous multithreading,Temporal multithreading,Instruction prefetch,Speedup
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
29
2
0163-5964
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-1162-7
145
6.08
References 
Authors
23
1
Search Limit
100145
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chi-Keung Luk12537116.49