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A thread partitioning approach for speculative multithreading

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Abstract

Speculative multithreading (SpMT) is a thread-level automatic parallelization technique, which partitions sequential programs into multithreads to be executed in parallel. This paper presents different thread partitioning strategies for nonloops and loops. For nonloops, we propose a cost estimation based on combined run-time effects of various speculation factors to predict the resulting performance of candidate threads to guide the thread partitioning. For loops, we parallelize all the profitable loops that can potentially offer additional performance benefits by multilevel spawning in loop bodies, loop iterations, and inner loops. Then we select a proper thread boundary located in the front of loop branch instruction to reduce invalid spawning threads that waste core resources. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can obtain a significant increase in speedup and Olden benchmarks reach a performance improvement of 6.62 % on average.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues for their collaboration and for providing the directions for the present work. We also thank all the reviewers for their specific comments and suggestions. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China through grants No. 61173040 and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2012AA011003.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, P.R. China

    Bin Liu, Yinliang Zhao, Yuxiang Li, Yanjun Sun & Boqin Feng

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  1. Bin Liu
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  2. Yinliang Zhao
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Correspondence to Bin Liu.

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Liu, B., Zhao, Y., Li, Y. et al. A thread partitioning approach for speculative multithreading. J Supercomput 67, 778–805 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-1000-1

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