A study of the Earth-Manna multithreaded system
- Intel. Corp. Measurement, Architecture and Planning, Hillsboro, OR (United States)
- McGill Univ. Montreal (Canada)
Multithreaded architectures have been proposed for future multiprocessor systems. However, some open issues remain. Can multithreading be supported in a multiprocessor so that it can tolerate synchronization and communication latencies, with little intrusion on the performance of sequentially-executed code? How much does such support contribute to scalable performance when communication and synchronization demands are high? In this paper, we describe the design of EARTH, an architecture which addresses these issues. Each processor in EARTH has an off-the-shelf Execution Unit (EU) for executing threads, and an ASIC Synchronization Unit (SU) supporting dataflow-like thread synchronizations, scheduling, and remote requests. In preparation for an implementation of the SU, we have emulated a basic EARTH model on MANNA 2.0, an existing multiprocessor whose hardware configuration closely matches EARTH. This EARTH-MANNA testbed is fully functional, enabling us to experiment with large benchmarks with impressive speed. With this platform, we demonstrate that multithreading support can be efficiently implemented (with little emulation overhead) in a multiprocessor without a major impact on uniprocessor performance. Also, we measure how much basic multithreading support can help in tolerating increasing communication/synchronization demands.
- OSTI ID:
- 441127
- Journal Information:
- International Journal of Parallel Programming, Vol. 24, Issue 4; Other Information: PBD: Aug 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Compiler-controlled multithreading for lenient parallel languages
The SISAL 2.0 reference manual