Multithreaded Processor Design - Moore, Simon W.

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Résumé :
Multithreaded Processor Design takes the unique approach of designing a multithreaded processor from the ground up. Every aspect is carefully considered to form a balanced design rather than making incremental changes to an existing design and then ignoring problem areas. The general purpose parallel computer is an elusive goal. Multithreaded processors have emerged as a promising solution to this conundrum by forming some amalgam of the commonplace control-flow (von Neumann) processor model with the more exotic data-flow approach. This new processor model offers many exciting possibilities and there is much research to be performed to make this technology widespread. Multithreaded processors utilize the simple and efficient sequential execution technique of control-flow, and also data-flow like concurrency primitives. This supports the conceptually simple but powerful idea of rescheduling rather than blocking when waiting for data, e.g. from large and distributed memories, thereby tolerating long data transmission latencies. This makes multiprocessing far more efficient because the cost of moving data between distributed memories and processors can be hidden by other activity. The same hardware mechanisms may also be used to synchronize interprocess communications to awaiting threads, thereby alleviating operating system overheads. Supporting synchronization and scheduling mechanisms in hardware naturally adds complexity. Consequently, existing multithreaded processor designs have tended to make incremental changes to existing control-flow processor designs to resolve some problems but not others. Multithreaded Processor Design serves as an excellent reference source and is suitable as a text for advanced courses in computer architecture dealing with the subject.

Sommaire:
1 Introduction.- 1.1 Aims.- 1.2 Background.- 1.3 Synopsis.- 2 Design Motivations.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Software motivations.- 2.3 Hardware motivations.- 2.4 Summary of hardware and software requirements.- 3 Current Processor Models.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Control-flow processors.- 3.3 Data-flow processors.- 3.4 Summary.- 4 Introduction to Multithreaded Processors.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Multiple contexts.- 4.3 Communication.- 4.4 Synchronisation and scheduling.- 4.5 Memory.- 4.6 Microthread size.- 4.7 Summary.- 5 Hardware Scheduling.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 Background.- 5.3 The tagged up/down sorter.- 5.4 Clocked digital implementations.- 5.5 Conclusions.- 6 Memory Structure.- 6.1 Introduction.- 6.2 Memory performance.- 6.3 Memory hierarchy for control-flow processors.- 6.4 Maintaining memory access frequency.- 6.5 Virtual addressing for the memory tree.- 6.6 Scalable memory protection.- 6.7 Tree routers.- 6.8 Summary.- 7 Anaconda - A Multithreaded Processor.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Data driven microthreads.- 7.3 Matching.- 7.4 Scheduling.- 7.5 Memory structure.- 7.6 Exceptions and types.- 7.7 Instructions.- 7.8 Cache control and preloading context.- 7.9 Nanokernel support.- 7.10 Input, output and timers.- 7.11 Execution unit pipeline.- 7.12 Summary.- 8 Evaluation.- 8.1 Introduction.- 8.2 Assembler.- 8.3 Simulator.- 8.4 Memory copy test.- 8.5 Livermore loop 7 test.- 8.6 Signalling and mutual exclusion.- 8.7 Interdomain remote procedure calls.- 8.8 Conclusions.- 9 Conclusions.- 9.1 Review.- 9.2 Future Research.- References.- A Anaconda Instruction Formats.- B Anaconda Memory Copy Program.