RIA: Tolerating Synchronization Delays Using Multithreadings

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9308981 Saavedra Multithreading, along with software prefetching, lock-up free caches, and weak consistency models, has been proposed as an effective hardware mechanism for mitigating the pernicious effects of the large latencies expected to be present in massive parallel machines. This research focuses in studying the extent to which virtual multithreading can be used to hide the long delays incurred by synchronization events. Virtual multithreading gives the illusion that the processor is executing a large number of threads using only a small amount of resources. Preliminary results indicate that, with sufficient hardware support, the combined execution of the virtual threads can be used effectively to hide extremely large synchronization delays. The goals of this research are: 1) explore new hardware mechanisms for the support of virtual threads and evaluate their cost-performance tradeoffs; 2) develop analytical formulas to model the effectiveness of virtual multithreading in terms of the most relevant machine and program parameters; 3) investigate the dynamic behavior of fine-grain parallel programs with respect to synchronization and use this information to construct models of program execution; and 4) develop a detailed simulator of a virtual multithreaded-based parallel machine and run an extensive set of experiments in order to validate the analytical models and hardware mechanisms. ***