SMA：一种新的多线程处理器模型

本文提出一种新的多线程处理器模型,它结合了前瞻性执行机制和多线程执行机制,既能从更大的指令窗口中开发出更多的ＩＬＰ,又能屏蔽各种长延迟操作,达到较高的资 源利用率。本文深入讨论了ＳＭＡ模型及其特点,并进行了初步的性能分析。     

细粒度多线程处理器中前瞻性数据加载的设计与实现

细粒度多线程是一种典型的线程级并行性开发技术,通过每周期的线程切换来实现高吞吐率执行.设计并实现了一种细粒度多线程处理器中的前瞻性数据加载机制,该机制预测LOAD操作在数据cache命中,不立即进行线程切换,而是继续执行后续指令,并通过数据旁路解决相关性问题.实验结果表明前瞻性数据加载能明显提高访存性能,在一种配置下,...     

缓解同时多线程结构中线程对关键资源的竞争

同时多线程处理器同时执行来自不同线程的指令,兼顾了线程内和线程间的指令并行,使处理器的性能得以大幅提升。然而这种对资源的共享方式,可能带来对关键资源(包括重命名寄存器、指令队列等)的恶性竞争,从而出现饿死现象,甚至影响处理器的吞吐率。这主要是由于某些线程遇到长延迟指令,并长期占据关键资源,从而导致其他线程对资源的需求无法得到满足,同时这也降低了资源的利用率。降低竞争带来的负面影响,主要有3种方法:线程调度——在取指段,决定从哪些线程取指令;指令调度——决定哪些指令进入关键资源;关键资源划分——为每个线程分配独立的关键资源。主要对这些调度策略进行综述。     

多核同时多线程处理器的线程调度器设计

多核同时多线程处理器(SMT_PAAG)是用于图形、图像及数字信号处理的一种多核处理器。基于这种处理器提出了一种硬件线程调度器,该调度器采用同时多线程技术,最多可同时执行四个线程,支持八个线程阻塞模式下的快速上下文切换。这样避免了因阻塞带来的等待问题,能够有效提高处理器的工作效率和资源利用率。通过在处理器上运行图形处理算法进行性能评测。结果表明,SMT-PAAG处理器通过挖掘指令级并行和线程级并行,将处理器的性能提高了69.25%。     

同时多线程处理器上的动态分支预测器设计方案研究

同时多线程处理器（SMT）每个周期能够从多个线程中发射指令执行,从而大大地提高了超标量微处理器的指令吞吐量,但多个线程的同时执行也带来了许多硬件资源的共享冲突问题.其中,多个线程共享分支预测硬件的方案会对分支预测精度产生较大的影响.研究SMT处理器中分支处理方案对于处理器整体性能的影响,对于指导SMT处理器的设计是十分重要的.本文利用SMT处理器模拟器,针对各线程运行独立应用的SMT结构实验评估了几种著名的分支预测方案;给出了在单线程和多线程情况下,分支预测方案对分支预测精度和处理器整体性能的影响的分析;总结出在这样的SMT结构中,各线程拥有独立的预测器是一种较好的选择,并且由于各独立预测器可以采用小而简单的结构,所以不会带来太多的硬件开销.     

冗余多线程结构的重命名寄存器配对共享分配策略

同时多线程处理器允许多个线程同时执行,一方面提高了处理器的性能,另一方面也为通过线程冗余执行来容错提供了支持.冗余多线程结构将线程复制成两份,二者独立执行,并比较结果,从而实现检错或者容错.冗余多线程结构主要采用ICOUNT调度策略来解决线程间资源共享问题.然而这种策略有可能造成"饥饿"现象,并降低处理器吞吐率.提出一...     

同时多线程处理器共享资源的特性分析

同时多线程处理器中同时执行的线程共享处理器中的资源,而这些有限的共享资源在线程之间的分配状况将决定每个线程执行的性能和处理器的总体性能。如何根据不同类别共享资源的特性对它们进行合理有效分配成为同时多线程处理器研究的重要课题之一。本文对同时多线程处理器中各类共享资源的特性进行深入研究与分析,分析结果表明,队列类共享资源的分配方式对每个线程执行的性能和SMT处理器的总体性能具有至关重要的影响。因此,同时多线程处理器中共享资源分配的关键在于控制队列类共享资源的分配。     

32位多线程包处理微引擎的设计

硬件多线程技术是网络处理器中的核心技术，本文介绍了一个专门面向网络协议处理的硬件多线程包处理微引擎NRS05的设计，详细介绍了其流水线的整体结构，提出了一种基于混合多线程的动态调度策略实现了长延时操作的隐藏，保证单线程性能能够满足应用需求的同时保证了各线程在执行核上运行的公平性，并将多线程技术和流水线技术进行了结合，解决了传统处理器中指令间因控制相关导致的流水线停顿问题，最后给出了设计的综合结果及包处理性能．     

基于同时多线程的IFSBSMT取指策略研究

取指策略直接影响处理器的指令吞吐率.针对传统处理器取指策略存在取指带宽利用不均衡、指令队列冲突率高的缺点,提出基于同时多线程处理器的取指策略IFSBSMT.该策略以线程的IPC值为基础,速取优先级高的线程进行取指,并利用预取指令条数预算的方式分配取指带宽,采取线程IPC值和L2 Cache缺失率的双优先级动态资源分配机制分配处理器的系统资源.研究结果表明,IFSBSMT策略有效地解决了取指带宽、指令队列冲突及资源浪费问题,进一步提高了指令吞吐率,且具有较好的取指公平性.     

时钟共享多线程处理器通信机制的设计与实现

多核多线程处理器~([1])是并行技术的一个发展方向,基于多核多线程处理器,提出了一种时钟共享多线程处理器。该处理器有近邻通信和线程间通信两种通信机制,近邻通信采用近邻共享FIFO来传递信息,线程间通信通过线程间共享存储来传递信息,这样可以提高处理器的资源利用率和并行执行能力。     

On the Boosting of Instruction Scheduling by Renaming

Speculative execution is the execution of instructions before it is known whether these instructions should be executed. In the speculative execution for instruction level parallelism (ILP) processors, the concept of shadow register provides a hardware solution to maintain semantics of a program from the pollution of boosted instructions that are incorrectly predicted. In a recent study, Chang and Lai proposed a special register file based on shadow register, named conjugate register file (CRF), to support multilevel boosting in speculative execution. They also proposed a scheduling heuristic named frequency-driven scheduling to incorporate with CRF for execution. However, the ability of boosting is still constrained since the concept of register pair will force the results produced speculatively be stored in dedicated locations. Moreover, when the parallelism potential increases to tens through the advancement of hardware techniques, the heavy demand on register usage and the complexity of register file may well become a serious bottleneck for the exploitation of ILP.In this paper, the algorithm of frequency-driven scheduling is modified by replacing the function of hardware CRF with the technique of variable renaming during compilation. The new scheduling technique, named LESS, can exploit the parallelism efficiently with limited number of registers. Moreover, since the technique can benefit ILP without any special hardware support, it can be incorporated with any other ILP architecture without changing its instruction set architecture (ISA).Simulation results show that the performance achievable by LESS is better than other existing methods. For example, under the ILP model with an issue rate of 8, the speculative execution can achieve an increase of 34% in parallelism, as compared to 18% in CRF scheme.     

EDGE结构上一种通过超块重组加速单线程应用的方法

Explicit Data Graph Execution(EDGE)ISA是一种专门为类数据流驱动的分片式众核处理器而设计的指令集体系结构.相较于传统的采用控制流驱动的处理器,EDGE结构以超块(Hyperblock)而不是单个指令作为其执行单位,在超块内部实现数据流执行,超块之间按照推测序保持控制流执行,有利于挖掘指令级并行性.但是,EDGE编译器按照程序的串行执行顺序组织超块,超块间和超块内部受限于数据依赖,削弱了整个程序运行时的潜在数据级并行性和线程级并行性,不利于发挥EDGE分片式结构的优势.本文通过分析EDGE编译器超块组织的特点,结合EDGE结构特有的执行模型,提出一种普适性的超块组织框架来模拟EDGE结构上多线程运行的效果,进一步挖掘EDGE结构运行串行单线程程序时的指令级并行性.本文选用TRIPS微处理器作为EDGE结构的实例处理器,利用矩阵乘法等三个实验验证了我们所提出的框架的可行性,实验结果表明这些应用在TRIPS上获得了较好的性能提升.     

Coarse-grained thread pipelining: a speculative parallel executionmodel for shared-memory multiprocessors

This paper presents a new parallelization model, called coarse-grained thread pipelining, for exploiting speculative coarse-grained parallelism from general-purpose application programs in shared-memory multiprocessor systems. This parallelization model, which is based on the fine-grained thread pipelining model proposed for the superthreaded architecture, allows concurrent execution of loop iterations in a pipelined fashion with runtime data-dependence checking and control speculation. The speculative execution combined with the runtime dependence checking allows the parallelization of a variety of program constructs that cannot be parallelized with existing runtime parallelization algorithms. The pipelined execution of loop iterations in this new technique results in lower parallelization overhead than in other existing techniques. We evaluated the performance of this new model using some real applications and a synthetic benchmark. These experiments show that programs with a sufficiently large grain size compared to the parallelization overhead obtain significant speedup using this model. The results from the synthetic benchmark provide a means for estimating the performance that can be obtained from application programs that will be parallelized with this model. The library routines developed for this thread pipelining model are also useful for evaluating the correctness of the codes generated by the superthreaded compiler and in debugging and verifying the simulator for the superthreaded processor     

Exploiting an abstract-machine-based framework in the design of a Java ILP processor

Abstract machines bridge the gap between the high-level of programming languages and the low-level mechanisms of a real machine. The paper proposed a general abstract-machine-based framework (AMBF) to build instruction level parallelism processors using the instruction tagging technique. The constructed processor may accept code written in any (abstract or real) machine instruction set, and produce tagged machine code after data conflicts are resolved. This requires the construction of a tagging unit which emulates the sequential execution of the program using tags rather than actual values. The paper presents a Java ILP processor by using the proposed framework. The Java processor takes advantage of the tagging unit to dynamically translate Java bytecode instructions to RISC-like tag-based instructions to facilitate the use of a general-purpose RISC core and enable the exploitation of instruction level parallelism. We detailed the Java ILP processor architecture and the design issues. Benchmarking of the Java processor using SpecJVM98 and Linpack has shown the overall ILP speedup improvement between 78% and 173%.     

High-performance and low-cost dual-thread VLIW processor using Weld architecture paradigm

This paper presents a cost-effective and high-performance dual-thread VLIW processor model. The dual-thread VLIW processor model is a low-cost subset of the Weld architecture paradigm. It supports one main thread and one speculative thread running simultaneously in a VLIW processor with a register file and a fetch unit per thread along with memory disambiguation hardware for speculative load and store operations. This paper analyzes the performance impact of the dual-thread VLIW processor, which includes analysis of migrating disambiguation hardware for speculative load operations to the compiler and of the sensitivity of the model to the variation of branch misprediction, second-level cache miss penalties, and register file copy time. Up to 34 percent improvement in performance can be attained using the dual-thread VLIW processor when compared to a single-threaded VLIW processor model.     

A case for fault tolerance and performance enhancement using chip multi-processors

This paper makes a case for using multi-core processors to simultaneously achieve transient-fault tolerance and performance enhancement. Our approach is extended from a recent latency-tolerance proposal, dual-core execution (DCE). In DCE, a program is executed twice in two processors, named the front and back processors. The front processor pre-processes instructions in a very fast yet highly accurate way and the back processor re-executes the instruction stream retired from the front processor. The front processor runs faster as it has no correctness constraints whereas its results, including timely prefetching and prompt branch misprediction resolution, help the back processor make faster progress. In this paper, we propose to entrust the speculative results of the front processor and use them to check the un-speculative results of the back processor. A discrepancy, either due to a transient fault or a mispeculation, is then handled with the existing mispeculation recovery mechanism. In this way, both transient-fault tolerance and performance improvement can be delivered simultaneously with little hardware overhead.     

Performance Evaluation of Dynamic Speculative Multithreading with the Cascadia Architecture

Thread-level parallelism (TLP) has been extensively studied in order to overcome the limitations of exploiting instruction-level parallelism (ILP) on high-performance superscalar processors. One promising method of exploiting TLP is Dynamic Speculative Multithreading (D-SpMT), which extracts multiple threads from a sequential program without compiler support or instruction set extensions. This paper introduces Cascadia, a D-SpMT multicore architecture that provides multigrain thread-level support and is used to evaluate the performance of several benchmarks. Cascadia applies a unique sustainable IPC (sIPC) metric on a comprehensive loop tree to select the best performing nested loop level to multithread. This paper also discusses the relationships that loops have on one another, in particular, how loop nesting levels can be extended through procedures. In addition, a detailed study is provided on the effects that thread granularity and interthread dependencies have on the entire system.     

Task Selection for the Multiscalar Architecture

The multiscalar architecture advocates a distributed processor organization and task-level speculation to exploit high degrees of instruction level parallelism (ILP) in sequential programs without impeding improvements in clock speeds. The main goal of this paper is to understand the key implications of the architectural features of distributed processor organization and task-level speculation for compiler task selection from the point of view of performance. We identify the fundamental performance issues to be: control flow speculation, data communication, data dependence speculation, load imbalance, and task overhead. We show that these issues are intimately related to a few key characteristics of tasks: task size, intertask control flow, and intertask data dependence. We describe compiler heuristics to select tasks with favorable characteristics. We report experimental results to show that the heuristics are successful in boosting overall performance by establishing larger ILP windows. We also present a breakdown of execution times to show that register wait, load imbalance, control flow squash, and conventional pipeline losses are significant for almost all the SPEC95 benchmarks.     

Compiler Techniques for the Superthreaded Architectures1, 2

Several useful compiler and program transformation techniques for the superthreaded architectures are presented in this paper. The superthreaded architecture adopts a thread pipelining execution model to facilitate runtime data dependence checking between threads, and to maximize thread overlap to enhance concurrency. In this paper, we present some important program transformation techniques to facilitate concurrent execution among threads, and to manage critical system resources such as the memory buffers effectively. We evaluate the effectiveness of those program transformation techniques by applying them manually on several benchmark programs, and using a trace-driven, cycle-by-cycle superthreaded processor simulator. The simulation results show that a superthreaded processor can achieve promising speedup for most of the benchmark programs.     

Construction of speculative optimization algorithms

In modern processors, instructions to perform operations are often produced before it becomes known that this is required. Such an expedient, which is called speculative execution, helps to reveal parallelism at the instruction level. In the EPIC architectures, the speculative execution is completely controlled by the compiler, which makes it possible to avoid using complex hardware mechanisms for supporting speculative instruction production. Moreover, the idea of the speculative execution can be used by the compiler in machine-independent optimizations. The paper describes a scheme of construction of the speculative optimization that is based on the selection of properties of the control flow and data flow that are important from the optimization standpoint and on the estimation of the probabilities of their fulfillment. The probabilities found are used for searching and constructing advantageous speculative and bookkeeping transformations. For optimizations that include only speculative movements of instructions upwards along the control flow graph, on the basis of the suggested scheme, a method has been developed that includes algorithms for finding probabilities of data and control dependences, for estimating benefit of speculative movements, and for constructing a recovery code. On the basis of this method, an algorithm for the speculative scheduling of instructions for the Intel Itanium architecture has been developed and implemented. Specific features of its implementation and experimental results are described.