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Exploiting choice: Instruction fetch and issue on an implementable simultaneous multithreading processor
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE 23RD ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
, 1996
"... Simultaneous multithreading is a technique that permits multiple independent threads to issue multiple instructions each cycle. In previous work we demonstrated the performance potential of simultaneous multithreading, based on a somewhat idealized model. In this paper we show that the throughput ga ..."
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Cited by 382 (37 self)
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Simultaneous multithreading is a technique that permits multiple independent threads to issue multiple instructions each cycle. In previous work we demonstrated the performance potential of simultaneous multithreading, based on a somewhat idealized model. In this paper we show that the throughput gains from simultaneous multithreading can be achieved without extensive changes to a conventional wide-issue superscalar, either in hardware structures or sizes. We present an architecture for simultaneous multithreading that achieves three goals: (1) it minimizes the architectural impact on the conventional superscalar design, (2) it has minimal performance impact on a single thread executing alone, and (3) it achieves significant throughput gains when running multiple threads. Our simultaneous multithreading architecture achieves a throughput of 5.4 instructions per cycle, a 2.5-fold improvement over an unmodified superscalar with similar hardware resources. This speedup is enhanced by an advantage of multithreading previously unexploited in other architectures: the ability to favor for fetch and issue those threads most efficiently using the processor each cycle, thereby providing the “best” instructions to the processor.
Single-ISA Heterogeneous Multi-Core Architectures: The Potential for Processor Power Reduction
, 2003
"... This paper proposes and evaluates single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core architectures as a mechanism to reduce processor power dissipation. Our design incorporates heterogeneous cores representing different points in the power/performance design space; during an application 's execution, system s ..."
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Cited by 349 (22 self)
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This paper proposes and evaluates single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core architectures as a mechanism to reduce processor power dissipation. Our design incorporates heterogeneous cores representing different points in the power/performance design space; during an application 's execution, system software dynamically chooses the most appropriate core to meet specific performance and power requirements.
Symbiotic Jobscheduling for a Simultaneous Multithreading Processor
- In Eighth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
, 2000
"... Simultaneous Multithreading machines fetch and execute instructions from multiple instruction streams to increase system utilization and speedup the execution of jobs. When there are more jobs in the system than there is hardware to support simultaneous execution, the operating system scheduler must ..."
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Cited by 347 (15 self)
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Simultaneous Multithreading machines fetch and execute instructions from multiple instruction streams to increase system utilization and speedup the execution of jobs. When there are more jobs in the system than there is hardware to support simultaneous execution, the operating system scheduler must choose the set of jobs to coschedule This paper demonstrates that performance on a hardware multithreaded processor is sensitive to the set of jobs that are coscheduled by the operating system jobscheduler. Thus, the full benefits of SMT hardware can only be achieved if the scheduler is aware of thread interactions. Here, a mechanism is presented that allows the scheduler to significantly raise the performance of SMT architectures. This is done without any advance knowledge of a workload's characteristics, using sampling to identify jobs which run well together.
Transient Fault Detection via Simultaneous Multithreading
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE 27TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
, 2000
"... Smaller feature sizes, reduced voltage levels, higher transistor counts, and reduced noise margins make future generations of microprocessors increasingly prone to transient hardware faults. Most commercial fault-tolerant computers use fully replicated hardware components to detect microprocessor fa ..."
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Cited by 267 (7 self)
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Smaller feature sizes, reduced voltage levels, higher transistor counts, and reduced noise margins make future generations of microprocessors increasingly prone to transient hardware faults. Most commercial fault-tolerant computers use fully replicated hardware components to detect microprocessor faults. The components are lockstepped (cycle-by-cycle synchronized) to ensure that, in each cycle, they perform the same operation on the same inputs, producing the same outputs in the absence of faults. Unfortunately, for a given hardware budget, full replication reduces performance by statically partitioning resources among redundant operations. We demonstrate
The Potential for Using Thread-Level Data Speculation to Facilitate Automatic Parallelization
- HPCA-4
, 1998
"... As we look to the future, and the prospect of a billion transistors on a chip, it seems inevitable that microprocessors will exploit having multiple parallel threads. To achieve the full potential of these "single-chip multiprocessors," however, we must find a way to parallelize non-numeri ..."
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Cited by 256 (9 self)
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As we look to the future, and the prospect of a billion transistors on a chip, it seems inevitable that microprocessors will exploit having multiple parallel threads. To achieve the full potential of these "single-chip multiprocessors," however, we must find a way to parallelize non-numeric applications. Unfortunately, compilers have had little success in parallelizing non-numeric codes due to their complex access patterns. This paper explores the potential for using thread-level data speculation (TLDS) to overcome this limitation by allowing the compiler to view parallelization solely as a cost/benefit tradeoff, rather than something which is likely to violate program correctness. Our experimental results demonstrate that with realistic compiler support, TLDS can offer significant program speedups. We also demonstrate that through modest hardware extensions, a generic single-chip multiprocessor could support TLDS by augmenting its cache coherence scheme to detect dependence violations, and by using the primary data caches to buffer speculative state.
AR-SMT: A Microarchitectural Approach to Fault Tolerance in Microprocessors
, 1999
"... This paper speculates that technology trends pose new challenges for fault tolerance in microprocessors. Specifically, severely reduced design tolerances implied by gigaherz clock rates may result in frequent and arbitrary transient faults. We suggest that existing fault-tolerant techniques -- syste ..."
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Cited by 246 (8 self)
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This paper speculates that technology trends pose new challenges for fault tolerance in microprocessors. Specifically, severely reduced design tolerances implied by gigaherz clock rates may result in frequent and arbitrary transient faults. We suggest that existing fault-tolerant techniques -- system-level, gate-level, or component-specific approaches -- are either too costly for general purpose computing, overly intrusive to the design, or insufficient for covering arbitrary logic faults. An approach in which the microarchitecture itself provides fault tolerance is required. We propose a new time redundancy fault-tolerant approach in which a program is duplicated and the two redundant programs simultaneously run on the processor. The technique exploits several significant microarchitectural trends to provide broad coverage of transient faults and restricted coverage of permanent faults. These trends are simultaneous multithreading, control flow and data flow prediction, and hierarchi...
A Scalable Approach to Thread-Level Speculation
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE 27TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
, 2000
"... While architects understandhow to build cost-effective parallel machines across a wide spectrum of machine sizes (ranging from within a single chip to large-scale servers), the real challenge is how to easily create parallel software to effectively exploit all of this raw performancepotential. One p ..."
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Cited by 232 (20 self)
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While architects understandhow to build cost-effective parallel machines across a wide spectrum of machine sizes (ranging from within a single chip to large-scale servers), the real challenge is how to easily create parallel software to effectively exploit all of this raw performancepotential. One promising technique for overcoming this problem is Thread-Level Speculation (TLS), which enables the compiler to optimistically create parallel threads despite uncertainty as to whether those threads are actually independent. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a design for supporting TLS that seamlessly scales to any machine size because it is a straightforward extension of writeback invalidation-based cache coherence (which itself scales both up and down). Our experimental results demonstrate that our scheme performs well on both single-chip multiprocessors and on larger-scale machines where communication latencies are twenty times larger.
Monsoon: an explicit token-store architecture
- In Proc. of the 17th Annual Int. Symp. on Comp. Arch
, 1990
"... Dataflow architectures tolerate long unpredictable com-munication delays and support generation and coordi-nation of parallel activities directly in hardware, rather than assuming that program mapping will cause these issues to disappear. However, the proposed mecha-nisms are complex and introduce n ..."
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Cited by 194 (13 self)
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Dataflow architectures tolerate long unpredictable com-munication delays and support generation and coordi-nation of parallel activities directly in hardware, rather than assuming that program mapping will cause these issues to disappear. However, the proposed mecha-nisms are complex and introduce new mapping com-plications. This paper presents a greatly simplified ap-proach to dataflow execution, called the explicit token store (ETS) architecture, and its current realization in Monsoon. The essence of dynamic datallow execution is captured by a simple transition on state bits associ-ated with storage local to a processor. Low-level storage management is performed by the compiler in assigning nodes to slots in an activation frame, rather than dy-namically in hardware. The processor is simple, highly pipelined, and quite general. It may be viewed as a generalization of a fairly primitive von Neumann archi-tecture. Although the addressing capability is restric-tive, there is exactly one instruction executed for each action on the dataflow graph. Thus, the machine ori-ented ETS model provides new understanding of the merits and the real cost of direct execution of dataflow graphs. 1
Hyperthreading technology architecture and microarchitecture.
- Intel Technical Journal,
, 2002
"... ABSTRACT Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology brings the concept of simultaneous multi-threading to the Intel Architecture. Hyper-Threading Technology makes a single physical processor appear as two logical processors; the physical execution resources are shared and the architecture state is dup ..."
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Cited by 182 (1 self)
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ABSTRACT Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology brings the concept of simultaneous multi-threading to the Intel Architecture. Hyper-Threading Technology makes a single physical processor appear as two logical processors; the physical execution resources are shared and the architecture state is duplicated for the two logical processors. From a software or architecture perspective, this means operating systems and user programs can schedule processes or threads to logical processors as they would on multiple physical processors. From a microarchitecture perspective, this means that instructions from both logical processors will persist and execute simultaneously on shared execution resources. This paper describes the Hyper-Threading Technology architecture, and discusses the microarchitecture details of Intel's first implementation on the Intel Xeon processor family. Hyper-Threading Technology is an important addition to Intel's enterprise product line and will be integrated into a wide variety of products.
Speculative Precomputation: Long-range Prefetching of Delinquent Loads
, 2001
"... This paper explores Speculative Precomputation, a technique that uses idle thread contexts in a multithreaded architecture to improve performance of single-threaded applications. It attacks program stalls from data cache misses by pre-computing future memory accesses in available thread contexts, an ..."
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Cited by 180 (23 self)
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This paper explores Speculative Precomputation, a technique that uses idle thread contexts in a multithreaded architecture to improve performance of single-threaded applications. It attacks program stalls from data cache misses by pre-computing future memory accesses in available thread contexts, and prefetching these data. This technique is evaluated by simulating the performance of a research processor based on the Itanium TM ISA supporting Simultaneous Multithreading. Two primary forms of Speculative Precomputation are evaluated. If only the non-speculative thread spawns speculative threads, performance gains of up to 30% are achieved when assuming ideal hardware. However, this speedup drops considerably with more realistic hardware assumptions. Permitting speculative threads to directly spawn additional speculative threads reduces the overhead associated with spawning threads and enables significantly more aggressive speculation, overcoming this limitation. Even with realistic costs for spawning threads, speedups as high as 169% are achieved, with an average speedup of 76%. 1.
