This thesis introduces the use of hierarchy and clusters in multithreaded execution, which allows several fragments of an application to be specifically optimised and executed by clusters of thread processing units (TPUs) as orchestrated by compile-time analyses. Our multithreaded architecture is a network of homogeneous thread processing units. Additional features were proposed, aiming at dynamic clustering of the TPUs throughout the entire program execution as well as minimum hardware support for speculative execution. The architecture executes a sub-set of the MIPS insruction set augmented with multithreaded instructions. A multithreaded compilation system was implemented, which focuses on high-level or front-end transformation from sequential C programs to multithreaded ones. Empirical studies were conducted on benchmarks containing two types of program structures: loops and conditional branches. Coarse-grained control speculation enables simultaneous execution of several sub-problems such as loops, each of which could in turn be executed by multiple threads. Strategies were proposed for allocating TPU resources to these sub-problems and evaluated in simulations. Significant speedups were observed in the performance of multithreaded loop execution, and could be further improved by the application of control speculation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:657393 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Marukatat, Rangsipan |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/12595 |
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