Combining thread level speculation helper threads and runahead execution

With the current trend toward multicore architectures, improved execution performance can no longer be obtained via traditional single-thread instruction level parallelism (ILP), but, instead, via multithreaded execution. Generating thread-parallel programs is hard and thread-level speculation (TLS) has been suggested as an execution model that can speculatively exploit thread-level parallelism (TLP) even when thread independence cannot be guaranteed by the programmer/compiler. Alternatively, the helper threads (HT) execution model has been proposed where subordinate threads are executed in parallel with a main thread in order to improve the execution efficiency (i.e., ILP) of the latter. Yet another execution model, runahead execution (RA), has also been proposed where subordinate versions of the main thread are dynamically created especially to cope with long-latency operations, again with the aim of improving the execution efficiency of the main thread. Each one of these multithr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Polychronis Xekalakis, Nikolas Ioannou, Marcelo Cintra
• Keywords: Execution Model, ICS 2009, Multithreaded Execution, Multithreaded Execution Model, Theoretical Computer Science