MOWER : A NEW DESIGN FOR NON-BLOCKING MISPREDICTION RECOVERY

Mower is a micro-architecture technique which targets branch misprediction penalties in superscalar processors. It speeds-up the misprediction recovery process by dynamically evicting stale instructions and fixing the RAT (Register Alias Table) using explicit branch dependency tracking. Tracking branch dependencies is accomplished by using simple bit matrices. This low-overhead technique allows overlapping of the recovery process with instruction fetching, renaming and scheduling from the correct path. Our evaluation of the mechanism indicates that it yields performance very close to ideal recovery and provides up to 5% speed-up and 2% reduction in power consumption compared to a traditional recovery mechanism using a reorder buffer and a walker. The simplicity of the mechanism should permit easy implementation of Mower in an actual processor

Application-aware Performance Optimization for Software Managed Manycore Architectures

abstract: One of the main goals of computer architecture design is to improve performance without much increase in the power consumption. It cannot be achieved by adding increasingly complex intelligent schemes in the hardware, since they will become increasingly less power-efficient. Therefore, parallelism comes up as the solution. In fact, the irrevocable trend of computer design in near future is still to keep increasing the number of cores while reducing the operating frequency. However, it is not easy to scale number of cores. One important challenge is that existing cores consume too much power. Another challenge is that cache-based memory hierarchy poses a serious limitation due to the rapidly increasing demand of area and power for coherence maintenance. In this dissertation, opportunities to resolve the aforementioned issues were explored in two aspects. Firstly, the possibility of removing hardware cache altogether, and replacing it with scratchpad memory with software management was explored. Scratchpad memory consumes much less power than caches. However, as data management logic is completely shifted to Software, how to reduce software overhead is challenging. This thesis presents techniques to manage scratchpad memory judiciously by exploiting application semantics and knowledge of data access patterns, thereby enabling optimization of data movement across the memory hierarchy. Experimental results show that the optimization was able to reduce stack data management overhead by 13X, produce better code mapping in more than 80% of the case, and improve performance by 83% in heap management. Secondly, the possibility of using software branch hinting to replace hardware branch prediction to completely eliminate power consumption on corresponding hardware components was explored. As branch predictor is removed from hardware, software logic is responsible for reducing branch penalty. Techniques to minimize the branch penalty by optimizing branch hint placement were proposed, which can reduce branch penalty by 35.4% over the state-of-the-art.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Mitigating the Effect of Misspeculations in Superscalar Processors

Modern superscalar processors highly rely on the speculative execution which speculatively executes instructions and then verifies. If the prediction is different from the execution result, a misspeculation recovery is performed. Misspeculation recovery penalties still account for a substantial amount of performance reduction. This work focuses on the techniques to mitigate the effect of recovery penalties and proposes practical mechanisms which are thoroughly implemented and analyzed. In general, we can divide the misspeculation penalty into four parts: misspeculation detection delay; stale instruction elimination delay; state restoration delay and pipeline fill delay. This dissertation does not consider the detection delay, instead, we design four innovative mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms target a specific recovery delay whereas others target multiple types of delay in a unified algorithm. Mower was designed to address the stale instruction elimination delay and the state restoration delay by using a special walker. When a misprediction is detected, the walker will scan and repair the instructions which are younger than the mispredicted instruction. During the walking procedure, the correct state is restored and the stale instructions are eliminated. Based on Mower, we further simplify the design and develop a Two-Phase recovery mechanism. This mechanism uses only a basic recovery mechanism except for the case in which the retire stage was stalled by a long latency instruction. When the retire stage is stalled, the second phase is launched and the instructions in the pipeline are re-fetched. Two-Phase mechanism recovers from an earlier point in the program and overlaps the recovery penalty with the long latency penalty. In reality, some of the instructions on the wrong path can be reused during the recovery. However, such reuse of misprediction results is not easy and most of the time involves significant complexity. We design Passing Loop to reduce the pipeline fill delay. We applied our mechanism only for short forward branches which eliminates a substantial amount of complexity. In terms of memory dependence speculation and associated delays due to memory ordering violations, we develop a mechanism that optimizes store-queue-free architectures. A store-queue-free architecture experiences more memory dependence mispredictions due to its aggressive approach to speculations. A common solution is to delay the execution of an instruction which is more likely to be mispredicted. We propose a mechanism to dynamically insert predicates for comparing the address of memory instructions, which is called “Dynamic Memory Dependence Predication” (DMDP). This mechanism boosts the instruction execution to its earliest point and reduces the number of mispredictions

Fast simulation techniques for microprocessor design space exploration

Designing a microprocessor is extremely time-consuming. Computer architects heavily rely on architectural simulators, e.g., to drive high-level design decisions during early stage design space exploration. The benefit of architectural simulators is that they yield relatively accurate performance results, are highly parameterizable and are very flexible to use. The downside, however, is that they are at least three or four orders of magnitude slower than real hardware execution. The current trend towards multicore processors exacerbates the problem; as the number of cores on a multicore processor increases, simulation speed has become a major concern in computer architecture research and development. In this dissertation, we propose and evaluate two simulation techniques that reduce the simulation time significantly: statistical simulation and interval simulation. Statistical simulation speeds up the simulation by reducing the number of dynamically executed instructions. First, we collect a number of program execution characteristics into a statistical profile. From this profile we can generate a synthetic trace that exhibits the same execution behavior but which has a much shorter trace length as compared to the original trace. Simulating this synthetic trace then yields a performance estimate. Interval simulation raises the level of abstraction in architectural simulation; it replaces the core-level cycle-accurate simulation model by a mechanistic analytical model. The analytical model builds on insights from interval analysis: miss events divide the smooth streaming of instructions into so called intervals. The model drives the timing by analyzing the type of the miss events and their latencies, instead of tracking the individual instructions as they propagate through the pipeline stages

Performance Limitations in Wide Superscalar Processors

Superscalar processors with wide instruction fetch only results in diminishing performance returns. The aim of this research to find what causes these limitations. In addition, a new cycle-accurate computer architecture simulator - AbaKus - is developed to study and evaluate the performance of the architecture designs. Eager-Based executions and their designs are tested to overcome the effects of low-accuracy of branch prediction on 38% of the conditional branch instructions. An improvement IPC of 27% on average is shown. However, confidence estimators need improvement on its design logic as they prove critical on the performance of eager-based executions. In addition, the limitation of compilers to extract ILP from the benchmark programs leads to a severe restriction on performance of Superscalar architectures due to data dependencies.School of Electrical & Computer Engineerin

Harnessing Checker Hierarchy for Reliable Microprocessors

Traditional fault-tolerant multi-threading architectures provide good fault tolerance by re-executing all the computations. However, such a full re-execution significantly increases the demand on the processor resources, resulting in severe performance degradation. To address this problem, this dissertation presents Active Verification Management (AVM) approaches that utilize a checker hierarchy to increase its performance with a minimal effect on the overall reliability. Based on a simplified queueing model, AVM employs a filter checker which prioritizes the verification candidates to selectively do verification. This dissertation proposes three filter checkers - based on (1) result usage, (2) result bitwidth, and (3) result anomaly - that exploit correctness-criticality metrics and anomaly speculation. Binary Correctness Criticality (BCC) and Likelihood of Correctness Criticality (LoCC) are metrics that quantify whether an instruction is important for reliability or how likely an instruction is correctness-critical, respectively. Based on the BCC, a result-usage-based filter checker mitigates the verification workload by bypassing instructions that are unnecessary for correct execution. Computing the LoCC is accomplished by exploiting information redundancy of compressing computationally useful data bits. Numerical significance hints let the result-bitwidth-based filter checker guide a verification priority effectively before the re-execution process starts. A result-anomaly-based filter checker exploits a value similarity property, which is defined by a frequent occurrence of partially identical values. Based on the biased distribution of similarity distance measure, this dissertation further investigates another application to exploit similar values for soft error tolerance with anomaly speculation. Extensive measurements show that the majority of instructions produce values that are different from the previous result value only in a few bits. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes accelerate the processor to be 180% faster than traditional fully-fault-tolerant processor, with a minimal impact on the overall soft error rate. With no AVM, congestion at the checker badly affects performance, to the tune of 57%, when compared to that of a non-fault-tolerant processor. These results explain that the proposed AVM has the potential to solve the verification congestion problem when perfect fault coverage is not needed

Infrastructures and Compilation Strategies for the Performance of Computing Systems

This document presents our main contributions to the field of compilation, and more generally to the quest of performance ofcomputing systems.It is structured by type of execution environment, from static compilation (execution of native code), to JIT compilation, and purelydynamic optimization. We also consider interpreters. In each chapter, we give a focus on the most relevant contributions.Chapter 2 describes our work about static compilation. It covers a long time frame (from PhD work 1995--1998 to recent work on real-timesystems and worst-case execution times at Inria in 2015) and various positions, both in academia and in the industry.My research on JIT compilers started in the mid-2000s at STMicroelectronics, and is still ongoing. Chapter 3 covers the results we obtained on various aspects of JIT compilers: split-compilation, interaction with real-time systems, and obfuscation.Chapter 4 reports on dynamic binary optimization, a research effort started more recently, in 2012. This considers the optimization of a native binary (without source code), while it runs. It incurs significant challenges but also opportunities.Interpreters represent an alternative way to execute code. Instead of native code generation, an interpreter executes an infinite loop thatcontinuously reads a instruction, decodes it and executes its semantics. Interpreters are much easier to develop than compilers,they are also much more portable, often requiring a simple recompilation. The price to pay is the reduced performance. Chapter 5presents some of our work related to interpreters.All this research often required significant software infrastructures for validation, from early prototypes to robust quasi products, andfrom open-source to proprietary. We detail them in Chapter 6.The last chapter concludes and gives some perspectives

Affordable techniques for dependable microprocessor design

As high computing power is available at an affordable cost, we rely on microprocessor-based systems for much greater variety of applications. This dependence indicates that a processor failure could have more diverse impacts on our daily lives. Therefore, dependability is becoming an increasingly important quality measure of microprocessors.;Temporary hardware malfunctions caused by unstable environmental conditions can lead the processor to an incorrect state. This is referred to as a transient error or soft error. Studies have shown that soft errors are the major source of system failures. This dissertation characterizes the soft error behavior on microprocessors and presents new microarchitectural approaches that can realize high dependability with low overhead.;Our fault injection studies using RISC processors have demonstrated that different functional blocks of the processor have distinct susceptibilities to soft errors. The error susceptibility information must be reflected in devising fault tolerance schemes for cost-sensitive applications. Considering the common use of on-chip caches in modern processors, we investigated area-efficient protection schemes for memory arrays. The idea of caching redundant information was exploited to optimize resource utilization for increased dependability. We also developed a mechanism to verify the integrity of data transfer from lower level memories to the primary caches. The results of this study show that by exploiting bus idle cycles and the information redundancy, an almost complete check for the initial memory data transfer is possible without incurring a performance penalty.;For protecting the processor\u27s control logic, which usually remains unprotected, we propose a low-cost reliability enhancement strategy. We classified control logic signals into static and dynamic control depending on their changeability, and applied various techniques including commit-time checking, signature caching, component-level duplication, and control flow monitoring. Our schemes can achieve more than 99% coverage with a very small hardware addition. Finally, a virtual duplex architecture for superscalar processors is presented. In this system-level approach, the processor pipeline is backed up by a partially replicated pipeline. The replication-based checker minimizes the design and verification overheads. For a large-scale superscalar processor, the proposed architecture can bring 61.4% reduction in die area while sustaining the maximum performance