Using speculative multithreading for general-purpose applications

As multi-core technology is currently deployed in computer industry primarily for limiting power consumption and improving system throughput, continued performance improvement of a single application on such systems remains an important and challenging task. Using thread-level parallelism (TLP) to improve instruction-level parallelism (ILP), i.e. to improve the number of instructions executed per clock cycle, has shown to be effective for many general-purpose applications. However, because of the program characteristics of these applications, effective speculative schemes at both thread and instruction levels are crucial. In the past few years, we have seen significant progress being made in the architectures and the compiler techniques to support such thread-level speculative execution model. In this talk, we will discuss these architectural and compiler issues, in particular, the compiler techniques that could support speculative multithreading for general-purpose applications.