SIGOPS

Advances in IC processing allow for more microprocessor design options. The increasing gate density and cost of wires in advanced integrated circuit technologies require that we look for new ways to use their capabilities effectively. This paper shows ...

Relaxed consistency models have been shown to significantly outperform sequential consistency for single-issue, statically scheduled processors with blocking reads. However, current microprocessors aggressively exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP)...

This paper describes the synchronization and communication primitives of the Cray T3E multiprocessor, a shared memory system scalable to 2048 processors. We discuss what we have learned from the T3D project (the predecessor to the T3E) and the rationale ...

Large-scale parallel machines are incorporating increasingly sophisticated architectural support for user-level messaging and global memory access. We provide a systematic evaluation of a broad spectrum of current design alternatives based on our ...

Modern languages and operating systems often encourage programmers to use threads, or independent control streams, to mask the overhead of some operations and simplify program structure. Multitasking operating systems use threads to mask communication ...

This paper describes a method to improve the cache locality of sequential programs by scheduling fine-grained threads. The algorithm relies upon hints provided at the time of thread creation to determine a thread execution order likely to reduce cache ...

One of the fundamental limits to high-performance, high-reliability file systems is memory's vulnerability to system crashes. Because memory is viewed as unsafe, systems periodically write data back to disk. The extra disk traffic lowers performance, ...

The ideal storage system is globally accessible, always available, provides unlimited performance and capacity for a large number of clients, and requires no management. This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of Petal, a system ...

This paper analyzes and quantifies the locality characteristics of numerical loop nests in order to suggest future directions for architecture and software cache optimizations. Since most programs spend the majority of their time in nests, the vast ...

While there has been an abundance of recent papers on hardware and software approaches to improving the performance of memory accesses, few papers have addressed the problem from the program's point of view. There is a general notion that certain ...

A basic rule in computer architecture is that a processor cannot execute an application faster than it fetches its instructions. This paper presents a novel cost-effective mechanism called the two-block ahead branch predictor. Information from the ...

Branch prediction is an important mechanism in modern microprocessor design. The focus of research in this area has been on designing new branch prediction schemes. In contrast, very few studies address the theoretical basis behind these prediction ...

Since the introduction of virtual memory demand-paging and cache memories, computer systems have been exploiting spatial and temporal locality to reduce the average latency of a memory reference. In this paper, we introduce the notion of value locality, ...

Interpreted languages have become increasingly popular due to demands for rapid program development, ease of use, portability, and safety. Beyond the general impression that they are "slow," however, little has been documented about the performance of ...

The explosive growth of the Internet and the proliferation of smart cellular phones and handheld wireless devices is widening an already large gap between Internet clients. Clients vary in their hardware resources, software sophistication, and quality ...

This paper describes Shasta, a system that supports a shared address space in software on clusters of computers with physically distributed memory. A unique aspect of Shasta compared to most other software distributed shared memory systems is that ...

On a distributed memory machine, hand-coded message passing leads to the most efficient execution, but it is difficult to use. Parallelizing compilers can approach the performance of hand-coded message passing by translating data-parallel programs into ...

In this paper we propose the use of a PCI-based programmable protocol controller for hiding communication and coherence overheads in software DSMs. Our protocol controller provides three different types of overhead tolerance: a) moving basic ...

One potentially attractive way to build large-scale shared-memory machines is to use small-scale to medium-scale shared-memory machines as clusters that are interconnected with an off-the-shelf network. To create a shared-memory programming environment ...

Software-controlled data prefetching offers the potential for bridging the ever-increasing speed gap between the memory subsystem and today's high-performance processors. While prefetching has enjoyed considerable success in array-based numeric codes, ...

Over the past decade, digital signal processors (DSPs) have emerged as the processors of choice for implementing embedded applications in high-volume consumer products. Through their use of specialized hardware features and small chip areas, DSPs ...

This paper presents a new technique, compiler-directed page coloring, that eliminates conflict misses in multiprocessor applications. It enables applications to make better use of the increased aggregate cache size available in a multiprocessor. This ...

New high-speed networks greatly encourage the use of network memory as a cache for virtual memory and file pages, thereby reducing the need for disk access. Because pages are the fundamental transfer and access units in remote memory systems, page size ...

There are two concurrent paths in a typical cache access --- one through the data array and the other through the tag array. The path through the data array drives the selected set out of the array. The path through the tag array determines cache hit/...

The dominant architecture for the next generation of shared-memory multiprocessors is CC-NUMA (cache-coherent non-uniform memory architecture). These machines are attractive as compute servers because they provide transparent access to local and remote ...