An Evaluation of Optimized Threaded Code Generation

Abstract

: Multithreaded architectures hold many promises: the exploitation of intra-thread locality and the latency tolerance of multithreaded synchronization can result in a more efficient processor utilization and higher scalability. The challenge for a code generation scheme is to make effective use of the underlying hardware by generating large threads with a large degree of internal locality without limiting the program level parallelism. Top-down code generation, where threads are created directly from the compiler's intermediate form, is effective at creating a relatively large thread. However, having only a limited view of the code at any one time limits the thread size. These top-down generated threads can therefore be optimized by global, bottom-up optimization techniques. In this paper, we present such bottom-up optimizations and evaluate their effectiveness in terms of overall performance and specific thread characteristics such as size, length, instruction level parallelism, numbe...