Speculative Execution on GPU: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

We explore the possibility of using GPUs for speculative execution: we implement software value prediction techniques to accelerate programs with limited parallelism, and software speculation techniques to accelerate programs that contain runtime parallelism, which are hard to parallelize statically. Our experiment results show that due to the relatively high overhead, mapping software value prediction techniques on existing GPUs may not bring any immediate performance gain. On the other hand, although software speculation techniques introduce some overhead as well, mapping these techniques to existing GPUs can already bring some performance gain over CPU.