Min-cut program decomposition for thread-level speculation

With billion-transistor chips on the horizon, single-chip multiprocessors (CMPs) are likely to become commodity components. Speculative CMPs use hardware to enforce dependence, allowing the compiler to improve performance by speculating on ambiguous dependences without absolute guarantees of independence. The compiler is responsible for decomposing a sequential program into speculatively parallel threads, while considering multiple performance overheads related to data dependence, load imbalance, and thread prediction. Although the decomposition problem lends itself to a min-cut-based approach, the overheads depend on the thread size, requiring the edge weights to be changed as the algorithm progresses. The changing weights make our approach different from graph-theoretic solutions to the general problem of task scheduling. One recent work uses a set of heuristics, each targeting a specific overhead in isolation, and gives precedence to thread prediction, without comparing the perfo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Troy A. Johnson, Rudolf Eigenmann, T. N. Vijaykumar
• Keywords: Edge Weights, Overheads, PLDI 2004, Programming Languages, Thread Prediction