プログラム全域を対象としたホットパスベース投機的マルチスレッド処理方式の提案

Abstract

Nowadays, multicore processor is common presence and available everywhere. However, when we try to speedup non-numerical programs, which are used by ordinary users much especially on both desktop and mobile computers, by introducing parallel computation on multicore processors, it is necessary to strictly keep both control and data dependencies between parallel tasks in order to get the correct computation result. In many cases, parallel computation is difficult for non-numerical programs on multicore processors, since these dependencies are complicated. To solve this problem,we propose a method of speculative thread-level parallel computation along the hot path, the most frequently executed control flow, on entire program, assuming the use of the support hardware of speculative multithreading. This utilizes the general property of program codes, that is, the control flow of program tends to be highly biased to quite a small number of path even if the program code contains many possibilities of paths. Our method divides conventional serial program into thread codes along the hot path, and the thread codes are executed in parallel on each processor core on multicore processor. Preliminary performance evaluation by trace-based simulation using SPEC CINT2000, that is the collection of practical programs for performance valuation purpose, shows that the speedup of 2.48 times at maximum and 1.94 times on average can be expected by using our method, as compared to the serial execution.