Improving the performance of speculatively parallel applications on the Hydra CMP

Hydra is a chip multiprocessor (CMP) with integrated support for thread-level speculation. Thread-level speculation provides a way to parallelize sequential programs without the need for data dependence analysis or synchronization. This makes it possible to parallelize applications for which static memory dependence analysis is difficult or impossible. While performance of the baseline Hydra system on applications with medium to large grain parallelism is good, the performance on integer applications with fine-grained parallelism is unimpressive. In this paper, we describe a collection of software and hardware techniques for improving speculation performance over the baseline speculative Hydra CMP. These techniques focus on reducing the overheads associated with speculation and improving the speculation behavior of the applications using code restructuring. When these techniques are applied to a set of eleven integer, multimedia and floating-point benchmarks, significant performan...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Kunle Olukotun, Lance Hammond, Mark Willey
• Keywords: Chip Multiprocessor, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICS 1999, Performance, Thread-level Speculation