Hardware primitives for the synthesis of multithreaded elastic systems

Elastic systems operate in a dataflow-like mode using a distributed scalable control and tolerating variable-latency computations. At the same time, multithreading increases the utilization of processing units and hides the latency of each operation by time-multiplexing operations of different threads in the datapath. This paper proposes a model to unify multithreading and elasticity. A new multithreaded elastic control protocol is introduced supported by low-cost elastic buffers that minimize the storage requirements without sacrificing performance. To enable the synthesis of multithreaded elastic architectures, new hardware primitives are proposed and utilized in two circuit examples to prove the applicability of the proposed approach.