Modulo scheduling with integrated register spilling for clustered VLIW architectures

Clustering is a technique to decentralize the design of future wide issue VLIW cores and enable them to meet the technology constraints in terms of cycle time, area and power dissipation. In a clustered design, registers and functional units are grouped in clusters so that new instructions are needed to move data between them. New aggressive instruction scheduling techniques are required to minimize the negative effect of resource clustering and delays in moving data around. In this paper we present a novel software pipelining technique that performs instruction scheduling with reduced register requirements, register allocation, register spilling and inter-cluster communication in a single step. The algorithm uses limited backtracking to reconsider previously taken decisions. This backtracking provides the algorithm with additional possibilities for obtaining high throughput schedules with low spill code requirements for clustered architectures. We show that the proposed approach outperforms previously proposed techniques and that it is very scalable independently of the number of clusters, the number of communication buses and communication latency. The paper also includes an exploration of some parameters in the design of future clustered VLIW cores.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Fast Key-Value Lookups with Node Tracker

Lookup operations for in-memory databases are heavily memory bound, because they often rely on pointer-chasing linked data structure traversals. They also have many branches that are hard-to-predict due to random key lookups. In this study, we show that although cache misses are the primary bottleneck for these applications, without a method for eliminating the branch mispredictions only a small fraction of the performance benefit is achieved through prefetching alone. We propose the Node Tracker (NT), a novel programmable prefetcher/pre-execution unit that is highly effective in exploiting inter key-lookup parallelism to improve single-thread performance. We extend NT with branch outcome streaming (BOS) to reduce branch mispredictions and show that this achieves an extra 3× speedup. Finally, we evaluate the NT as a pre-execution unit and demonstrate that we can further improve the performance in both single- and multi-threaded execution modes. Our results show that, on average, NT improves single-thread performance by 4.1× when used as a prefetcher; 11.9× as a prefetcher with BOS; 14.9× as a pre-execution unit and 18.8× as a pre-execution unit with BOS. Finally, with 24 cores of the latter version, we achieve a speedup of 203× and 11× over the single-core and 24-core baselines, respectively