Article

Reducing misspeculation overhead for module-level speculative execution

Authors:

Per StenstromAuthors Info & Claims

CF '05: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Computing frontiers

Pages 289 - 298

https://doi.org/10.1145/1062261.1062310

Published: 04 May 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Thread-level speculative execution is a technique that makes it possible for a wider range of single-threaded applications to make use of the processing resources in a chip multiprocessor.We consider module-level speculation, i.e., speculative threads executing the code after a module (i.e., a procedure, function, or method) call. Unfortunately, previous studies have shown that indiscriminate module-level speculation results in significant overheads, mainly due to frequent misspeculations. In addition to hurting performance, excessive overhead is harmful from a resource usage and energy efficiency standpoint. We show that the overhead when spawning speculative threads for all module continuations is on average three times as big as the time spent on useful execution on our baseline 8-way chip multiprocessorIn this paper, we present and make a detailed evaluation of a technique that aims at reducing the overhead associated with misspeculations. History-based prediction is used in an attempt to prevent speculative threads from being spawned when they are expected to cause misspeculations. We find that the overhead can be reduced with a factor of six on average compared to indiscriminate speculation. The impact on speedup is small for most applications, but in several cases speedup is slightly improved.

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Cited By

Kumar SSingh SAggarwal NGupta BAlhalabi WBand S(2022)An efficient hardware supported and parallelization architecture for intelligent systems to overcome speculative overheadsInternational Journal of Intelligent Systems10.1002/int.2306237:12(11764-11790)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1002/int.23062
Estebanez ALlanos DGonzalez-Escribano A(2016)A Survey on Thread-Level Speculation TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/293836949:2(1-39)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2938369
Xekalakis PIoannou NCintra M(2012)Mixed speculative multithreaded execution modelsACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/2355585.23555919:3(1-26)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2355585.2355591

Index Terms

Reducing misspeculation overhead for module-level speculative execution

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cover image ACM Conferences

CF '05: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Computing frontiers

May 2005

467 pages

ISBN:1595930191

DOI:10.1145/1062261

General Chair:
Nader Bagherzadeh,
Program Chairs:
Mateo Valero,
Alex Ramirez

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 May 2005

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May 4 - 6, 2005

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Cited By

Kumar SSingh SAggarwal NGupta BAlhalabi WBand S(2022)An efficient hardware supported and parallelization architecture for intelligent systems to overcome speculative overheadsInternational Journal of Intelligent Systems10.1002/int.2306237:12(11764-11790)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1002/int.23062
Estebanez ALlanos DGonzalez-Escribano A(2016)A Survey on Thread-Level Speculation TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/293836949:2(1-39)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2938369
Xekalakis PIoannou NCintra M(2012)Mixed speculative multithreaded execution modelsACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/2355585.23555919:3(1-26)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2355585.2355591

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