Speculative parallel threading architecture and compilation

Thread-level speculation is a technique that brings thread-level parallelism beyond the data flow limit by executing a piece of code ahead of time speculatively before all its input data are ready. This technique appears particularly appealing for speeding up hard-to-parallelize applications. Although various thread-level speculation architectures and compilation techniques have been proposed by the research community, scalar applications remain difficult to be parallelized. It has not yet shown how well these applications can actually be benefited from thread-level speculation and if the performance gain is significant enough to justify the required hardware support. In an attempt to understand and realize the potential gain with thread-level speculation especially for scalar applications, we proposed an SPT (Speculative Parallel Threading) architecture and developed an SPT compiler to generate optimal speculatively parallelized code. Our evaluation showed that with our SPT approach 10 SPECint2000 programs can achieve an average of 15.6% speedup on a two-core SPT processor by exploiting only loop parallelism. This paper describes the SPT architecture and the SPT compiler which performs aggressive cost-driven loop selection and transformation, and presents our performance evaluation results.