🚀 go-pugleaf

University of Colorado at Boulder
Department of Computer Science
ECOT 717 Engineering Center
Campus Box 430
Boulder, Colorado 803090430
(303) 4927514, FAX: (303) 4922844

CS COLLOQUIUM
SPECULATIVE SHARED-MEMORY ARCHITECTURES
Jose Martinez
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
NOTE:  Location, Date & Time Change

Monday, April 1, 2002
2:00 2:50 PM
Engineering Center Classroom 200

Refreshments will be served afterwards in ECOT 831

Thread-Level Speculation (TLS), a.k.a. Speculative Parallelization has 
emerged as a promising architectural technology to boost the performance of 
difficult-to-analyze codes.  Under TLS, these codes are executed 
speculatively in parallel.  The system provides a safety net, checking for 
dependence violations, and squashing and restarting offending threads on 
the fly.

In this talk I will present the two main contributions of my work to 
TLS.  First, I propose a scalable multiprocessor architecture for TLS.  We 
take a hierarchical approach that uses largely unmodified speculative 
chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) as building blocks.  Because of its 
scalability, the resulting system achieves high speedups in important 
non-analyzable loops of several applications.  Furthermore, its 
hierarchical structure successfully leverages future "commodity" 
speculative CMPs.

Second, I propose an application of TLS to overcome conservatively placed 
synchronization in parallel codes.  Instead of waiting, threads execute 
speculatively past active barriers, taken locks, and unset flags.  The 
proposed hardware solution is quite simple and it requires no programming 
effort, yet the performance improvements are very promising. We borrow the 
concept of "safe thread" from TLS to ensure that forward progress in the 
critical path is never compromised.

Host:  Dan Connors
------------------------------
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/events/colloquia/colloquia.html

Sign Language Interpreters Available Upon Request.  Please contact Jane 
Obrecht, Department of
Computer Science, Engineering  ECOT 722, 303-492-6101, at least five days 
prior to the colloquium.

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