Physical Experimentation with Prefetching Helper Threads on Intel's Hyper-Threaded Processors

Pre-execution techniques have received much attention as an effective way of prefetching cache blocks to tolerate the everincreasing memory latency. A number of pre-execution techniques based on hardware, compiler, or both have been proposed and studied extensively by researchers. They report promising results on simulators that model a Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) processor. In this paper, we apply the helper threading idea on a real multithreaded machine, i.e., Intel Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading Technology, and show that indeed it can provide wall-clock speedup on real silicon. To achieve further performance improvements via helper threads, we investigate three helper threading scenarios that are driven by automated compiler infrastructure, and identify several key challenges and opportunities for novel hardware and software optimizations. Our study shows a program behavior changes dynamically during execution. In addition, the organizations of certain critical hard...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Dongkeun Kim, Shih-Wei Liao, Perry H. Wang, Juan del Cuvillo, Xinmin Tian, Xiang Zou, Hong Wang 0003, Donald Yeung, Milind Girkar, John Paul Shen
• Keywords: CGO 2004, Helper Threading Idea, Helper Threads, Pre-execution Techniques, Software Engineering