Supporting fine-grained synchronization on a simultaneous multithreading processor

Author

Tullsen, Dean M. ; Lo, Jack L. ; Eggers, Susan J. ; Levy, Henry M.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., California Univ., San Diego, CA, USA

fYear

1999

fDate

9-13 Jan 1999

Firstpage

54

Lastpage

58

Abstract

This paper proposes and evaluates new synchronization schemes for a simultaneous multithreaded processor. We present a scalable mechanism that permits threads to cheaply synchronize within the processor, with blocked threads consuming no processor resources. We also introduce the concept of lock release prediction, which gains an additional improvement of 40%. Overall, we show that these improvements in synchronization cost enable parallelization of code that could not be effectively parallelized using traditional techniques

Keywords

multi-threading; multiprocessing systems; parallel architectures; synchronisation; blocked threads; code parallelization; fine-grained synchronization; lock release prediction; scalable mechanism; simultaneous multithreading processor; synchronization cost; Computer science; Costs; Hardware; Lifting equipment; Multithreading; Parallel processing; Program processors; Programming profession; Surface-mount technology; Yarn;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

High-Performance Computer Architecture, 1999. Proceedings. Fifth International Symposium On

Conference_Location

Orlando, FL

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0004-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HPCA.1999.744326

Filename

744326