Work

Federation

Year: 2010

Type: article

Abstract: Manycore architectures designed for parallel workloads are likely to use simple, highly multithreaded, in-order cores. This maximizes throughput, but only with enough threads to keep hardware utilized. For applications or phases with more limited parallelism, we describe creating an out-of-order processor on-the-fly, by federating two neighboring in-order cores. We reuse the large register file in the multithreaded cores to implement some out-of-order structures and reengineer other large, associative structures into simpler lookup tables. The resulting federated core provides twice the single-thread performance of the underlying in-order core, allowing the architecture to efficiently support a wider range of parallelism.

Source: ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization

DOI: 10.1145/1880043.1880046

Authors: Michael Boyer, David Tarjan, Kevin Skadron

Institution: University of Virginia

Language: English

Topic: Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Science Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation, Division of Computer and Network Systems, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems

Awards: SEI: Hierarchical Dependency Graphs for Col-Space Design with Application to Leukocyte Detection and Tracking, G1328846742, G2373053430, CSR--EHS--Reconciling Operating System and Hardware Thermal Control, Feedback Techniques for Integrating Power Management and Quality of Service in Servers