Improving SMT performance scheduling processes

Abstract

Nowadays, SMT (simultaneous multithreaded) architectures use aggressive techniques to execute instructions from different threads on shared resources simultaneously. SEMPRE (Superscalar architEcture with Multiple PRocesses in Execution) is a type of SMT architecture which was proposed to schedule and execute processes simultaneously. The waste of time on both process scheduling and context switching is minimal, providing high performance during the execution of applications. The SEMPRE architecture was analyzed and evaluated using execution-driven simulations of the SPEC benchmark suite. The simulations showed that process scheduling by hardware can provide reasonable performance over process scheduling by the operating system on equivalent SMT architectures, with little extra hardware. This higher performance is achieved because the hardware makes better use of the process time-slice. The performance of SEMPRE is always higher than the performance of traditional SMT, achieving more than 21% in some cases.