Speculative Parallelism Characterization Profiling in General Purpose Computing Applications

Abstract

General purpose computing applications have not yet been thoroughly explored in procedure level speculation, especially in the light-weighted profiling way. This paper proposes a light-weighted profiling mechanism to analyze speculative parallelism characterization in several classic general purpose computing applications from SPEC CPU2000 benchmark. By comparing the key performance factors in loop and procedure-level speculation, it includes new findings on the behaviors of loop and procedure-level parallelism under these applications. The experimental results are as follows. The best gzip application can only achieve a 2.4X speedup in loop level speculation, while the best mcf application can achieve almost 3.5X speedup in procedure level. It proves that our light-weighted profiling method is also effective. It is found that between the loop-level and procedure-level TLS, the latter is better on several cases, which is against the conventional perception. It is especially shown in the applications where their 'hot' procedure body is concluded as 'hot' loops.