Fast Track: Supporting Unsafe Optimizations with Software Speculation

The use of multi-core, multi-processor machines is opening new opportunities for software speculation, where program code is speculatively executed to improve performance at the additional cost of monitoring and error recovery. In this paper we describe a new system that use software speculation to support unsafely optimized code. We open a fast, unsafe track of execution but run the correct code on other processors to ensure correctness. We have developed an analytical model to measure the effect of major parameters including the speed of the fast track, its success rate, and its overheads. We have implemented a prototype and verified the correctness and performance using a synthetic benchmark on a 4-CPU machine.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IEEEPACT
• Authors: Kirk Kelsey, Chengliang Zhang, Chen Ding
• Keywords: Hardware, IEEEPACT 2007, Multi-processor Machines, Program Code, Software Speculation