Master/slave Speculative Parallelization And Approximate Code

Abstract

This dissertation describes Master/Slave Speculative Parallelization (MSSP), a novel execution paradigm to improve the execution rate of sequential programs by parallelizing them speculatively for execution on a multiprocessor. In MSSP, one processor---the master---executes an approximate copy of the program to compute values the program's execution is expected to compute. The master's results are then checked by the slave processors by comparing them to the results computed by the original program. This validation is parallelized by cutting the program's execution into tasks. Each slave uses its predicted inputs (as computed by the master) to validate the input predictions of the next task, inductively validating the whole execution