Return to search

Design of the Execution-driven Simulation Environment for Hyper-scalar Architecture

As a result of the microprocessor system research and the development of VLSI manufacturing process technology, the recent trend and development in high performance computer have toward to multi-core architecture. However current multi-core architectures are designed by the symmetric multi processors (SMP) concept. In traditional SMP mechanism, there are only data link between processor cores. So a single thread only can be handled by a single core, it limits the usage rate in multi-core and performance can not increase.
This paper proposed a scalable chip multiprocessor architecture, which is called Hyper-scalar. The Principal characteristic of the architecture is ¡§design the interconnect control mechanisms for instructions in the multi-core¡¨. Some single scalar processor cores in Hyper-scalar architecture can be dynamically grouped as an n-way superscalar accelerator to improve the instruction-level parallelism, which is called accelerator group. Hyper-scalar combines the advantages of superscalar and multithreaded architecture; Hence, this architecture can not only enhance single-threaded performance by using accelerate group but also supports multithreaded applications.
The paper based on ARM instruction set, to analyze how to create the interactive control mechanisms for instruction in the multi-core, and how to enhance the performance of a single thread in the Hyper-scalar architecture. It can be divided into four parts: register flow, memory flow, instruction control flow, chop of multi cycle instruction. When instructions are issued into the processor, they must be attached dependence tags that can solve the dependence between all issued instructions. All instructions can exchange the data through the virtual shared register file (VSRF) mechanism, and all instructions are executed only when the operands are available. In the memory flow part: we solve the dependence problem with a simple technique¡Xto execute instruction in instruction order. In instruction control flow part: in order to improve performance, we perform speculation execution mechanism, so the instructions can out of order execution beyond the basic block. Finally because there are some multi cycle instructions in the ARM instruction set, in hyper-scalar framework can chop into many one cycle instructions to further enhance performance.
The simulation Model is written by SystemC, a modeling language based on C++ is to provide hardware-oriented simulation platform and the MediaBench suite is selected for the experiments. On average, the Hyper-scalar architecture can accelerate single-threaded performance by 50% to 300% using 2 ~ 8 cores.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0821108-165020
Date21 August 2008
CreatorsSu, Ding-Siang
ContributorsDa-Wei Chang, Jih-Ching Chiu, Tsung Lee
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0821108-165020
Rightsnot_available, Copyright information available at source archive

Page generated in 0.0019 seconds