Evaluation of Multithreaded Uniprocessors for Commercial Application Environments

As memory speeds grow at a considerably slower rate than processor speeds, memory accesses are starting to dominate the execution time of processors, and this will likely continue into the future. This trend will be exacerbated by growing miss rates due to commercial applications, object-oriented programming and micro-kernel based operating systems. We examine the use of coarse-grained multithreading to address this important problem in uniprocessor on-line transaction processing environments where there is a natural, coarse-grained parallelism between the tasks resulting from transactions being executed concurrently, with no application software modifications required. Our results suggest that multithreading can provide significant performance improvements for uniprocessor commercial computing environments.