Fast Track: A Software System for Speculative Program Optimization

—Fast track is a software speculation system that enables unsafe optimization of sequential code. It speculatively runs optimized code to improve performance and then checks the correctness of the speculative code by running the original program on multiple processors. We present the interface design and system implementation for Fast Track. It lets a programmer or a profiling tool mark fast-track code regions and uses a run-time system to manage the parallel execution of the speculative process and its checking processes and ensures the correct display of program outputs. The core of the run-time system is a novel concurrent algorithm that balances exploitable parallelism and available processors when the fast track is too slow or too fast. The programming interface closely affects the run-time support. Our system permits both explicit and implicit end markers for speculatively optimized code regions as well as extensions that allow the use of multiple tracks and user defined corr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Kirk Kelsey, Tongxin Bai, Chen Ding, Chengliang Zhang
• Keywords: CGO 2009, Code Regions, Optimized Code, Sequential Code, Software Engineering