Thread-spawning schemes for speculative multithreading

Speculative multithreading has been recently proposed to boost performance by means of exploiting thread-level parallelism in applications difficult to parallelize. The performance of these processors heavily depends on the partitioning policy used to split the program into threads. Previous work uses heuristics to spawn speculative threads based on easily-detectable program constructs such as loops or subroutines. In this work we propose a profile-based mechanism to divide programs into threads by searching for those parts of the code that have certain features that could benefit from potential thread-level parallelism. Our profile-based spawning scheme is evaluated on a Clustered Speculative Multithreaded Processor and results show large performance benefits. When the proposed spawning scheme is compared with traditional heuristics, we outperform them by almost 20%. When a realistic value predictor and a 8-cycle thread initialization penalty is considered, the performance difference between them is maintained. The speed-up over a single thread execution is higher than 5x for a 16-thread-unit processor and close to 2x for a 4-thread-unit processor.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Recensions

Jeremy RIFKIN, The end of work. The decline of the global labor force and the dawn of the post-market er

Recensions

R. DÍAZ-SALAZAR, S. GINER, F. VELASCO (eds.), "Formas modernas de religión

Thread partitioning and value prediction for exploiting speculative thread-level parallelism

Speculative thread-level parallelism has been recently proposed as a source of parallelism to improve the performance in applications where parallel threads are hard to find. However, the efficiency of this execution model strongly depends on the performance of the control and data speculation techniques. Several hardware-based schemes for partitioning the program into speculative threads are analyzed and evaluated. In general, we find that spawning threads associated to loop iterations is the most effective technique. We also show that value prediction is critical for the performance of all of the spawning policies. Thus, a new value predictor, the increment predictor, is proposed. This predictor is specially oriented for this kind of architecture and clearly outperforms the adapted versions of conventional value predictors such as the last value, the stride, and the context-based, especially for small-sized history tables.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Measuring healthcare deprivation from self-reported data

Master in Economics: Empirical Applications and Policies. Academic Year 2021-2022.The aim of this Master’s thesis is to analyze households’ healthcare deprivation and its determinants in Spain for the years 2014, 2017 and 2020. The analysis is divided in two main sections; the first one aims to determine the evolution and presence of healthcare deprivation in Spain by region and area using counting deprivation measures. The second aims to analyze the determinants of healthcare deprivation using zero inflated models from a multidimensional and unidimensional approach. We obtain that healthcare deprivation varies depending on the region and area; having the northern and rural areas less deprivation. And we conclude that income, area, number of retired and incapacitated members in the household and household size are variables that determine the level of deprivation of the households

Transparencia y rendición de cuentas en las Empresas de Inserción

Work integration social enterprises (WISE) are under pressure in two different regards. On the one hand, they have to participate in the market and compete with other firms, ensuring that they are sustainable in terms of prices, costs and quality. On the other hand, they endeavour to offer a means of social integration through employment. WISE must therefore show their efficiency from both an economic and a social perspective, justifying their usefulness and legitimacy to all the social actors. In order to be seen as socially legitimate they must do more than simply abide by the legal regulations; they must resort to accountability tools that provide greater transparency and responsibility than any other market entity. This paper presents an accountability model based on our experience with Aragonese WISE, theories of accountability in NPOs and a review of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).Social enterprises, transparency, social impact, accountability.

Joyful Babel. Translating Hélène Cixous, Myriam Diocaretz y Marta Segarra (eds.)

Obra ressenyada: Myriam DIOCARETZ y Marta SEGARRA (eds.), Joyful Babel. Translating Hélène Cixous. Amsterdam-Nueva York: Rodopi B.V., 2004

Fragile, limited, human

As Rubén Blades sang, life is full of surprises. Some are experienced individually, others have a social dimension that overflows one’s own will. In the last year, 2020, with the spread of the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, we have suffered a surprise with unusual effects and planetary scope. Routines that seemed immovable have been broken. Events of proven worldwide impact, such as the Tokyo Olympic Games, have had to be postponed. Or our own IV ISA Forum of Sociology, scheduled for July 2020, has had to be moved to February 2021, changing to a virtual format. And something similar has happened with personal projects and plans. The world’s agendas are filled with cancellations and changes