CMU-CS-98-171
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-98-171

Extending Cache Coherence to Support Thread-Level
Data Speculation on a Single Chip and Beyond

J. Gregory Steffan, Christopher B. Colohan, Todd C. Mowry

December 1998

CMU-CS-98-171.ps
CMU-CS-98-171.pdf


Keywords: Multiple data stream architectures (parallel processors), cache memories, performance of systems


Thread-Level Data Speculation (TLDS) is a technique which enables the optimistic parallelization of applications despite ambiguous data dependencies between the resulting threads. Although TLDS is mostly managed by software, hardware provides two key pieces of functionality: (i) detecting dependence violations, and (ii) buffering speculative side-effects until they can be safely committed to memory. To provide this functionality we present an extension to invalidation-based cache coherence which is both scalable and has a minimal impact on hardware complexity. We explore the design space in depth and find that our baseline architecture is sufficient to exploit speculative parallelism.

22 pages


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