Speculative Writing

Speculative somatics

Based on a presentation at The Undivided Mind conference at Plymouth University, this article sketches out speculative applications of somatics, the first person, phenomenological study of sensation, perception and movement. I first introduce the subject of somatics through an experiential exercise for the reader before summarizing theoretical aspects of somatic study. Drawing from the literatu...

Speculative Checkpointing

In large scale parallel systems, storing memory images with checkpointing will involve massive amounts of concentrated I/O from many nodes, resulting in considerable execution overhead. For user-level checkpointing, overhead reduction usually involves both spatial, i.e., reducing the amount of checkpoint data, and temporal, i.e., spreading out I/O by checkpointing data as soon as their values b...

Speculative Precomputation

Current processors are based on a multithreaded architecture. Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) techniques are used to increase instruction throughput under a multiprogramming workload; however, it does not improve performance when only a single thread is executing. This communication explores Speculative Precomputation, a technique that uses idle thread contexts in a multithreaded architecture...

Speculative Philosophy

Exploring Speculative Parallelism in Spec2006 Exploring Speculative Parallelism in Spec2006 Exploring Speculative Parallelism in Spec2006

Computer industry has adopted multi-threaded and multi-core architectures as the clock rate increase stalled in early 2000’s. It was hoped that the continuous improvement of single-program performance could be achieved through these architectures. However, traditional parallelizing compilers often fail to effectively parallelize general-purpose applications which typically have complex control ...