Compiler Support for Dynamic Speculative Pre-Execution

Speculative pre-execution is a promising prefetching technique which uses an auxiliary assisting thread in addition to the main program flow. A prefetching thread (p-thread), which contains the future probable cache miss instructions and backward slice, can run on the spare hardware context for data prefetching. Recently, various forms of speculative pre-execution have been developed, including hardware-based and software-based approaches. The hardware-based approach has the advantage to use runtime information dynamically. However, it requires a complex implementation and also lacks global information such as data and control flow. On the other hand, the software-oriented approach cannot cope with dynamic events and imposes additional software overhead. As a compromise, this paper introduces a hybrid model enhanced with novel compiler support for the dynamic pre-execution of a p-thread.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: IEEEINTERACT
• Authors: Won Woo Ro, Jean-Luc Gaudiot
• Keywords: Auxiliary Assisting Thread, Future Probable Cache, Hardware, IEEEINTERACT 2003, Speculative Pre-execution