Anaphase: A Fine-Grain Thread Decomposition Scheme for Speculative Multithreading

• Published in: 2009 18th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques pp. 15 - 25
• Main Authors: Madriles, C., Lopez, P., Codina, J.M., Gibert, E., Latorre, F., Martinez, A., Martinez, R., Gonzalez, A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Publication
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.01.2009; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Arquitectura de computadors; Automatic parallelization; Informàtica; Multicore; Multiprocessadors; Multiprocessors; Multithreading; Parallel processing (Electronic computers); Processament en paral·lel (Ordinadors); Single-thread performance; Speculative multithreading; Thread-level parallelism; Yarn; Àrees temàtiques de la UPC
• ISBN: 9780769537719; 0769537715
• ISSN: 1089-795X; 2641-7944
• DOI: 10.1109/PACT.2009.27

Industry is moving towards multi-core designs as we have hit the memory and power walls. Multi-core designs are very effective to exploit thread-level parallelism (TLP) but do not provide benefits when executing serial code (applications with low TLP, serial parts of a parallel application and legacy code). In this paper we propose Anaphase, a novel approach for speculative multithreading to improve single-thread performance in a multi-core design. The proposed technique is based on a graph partitioning technique which performs a decomposition of applications into speculative threads at instruction granularity. Moreover, the proposed technique leverages communications and pre-computation slices to deal with inter-thread dependences. Results presented in this paper show that this approach improves single-thread performance by 32% on average and up to 2.15x for some selected applications of the Spec2006 suite. In addition, the proposed technique outperforms by 21% on average schemes in which thread decomposition is performed at a coarser granularity.