The Superthreaded Architecture: Thread Pipelining with Run-Time Data Dependence Checking and Control - Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, 1996., Proceedings of the 1996 Conference on

This paper presents a new concurrent multiplethreaded architectural model, called superthreading, f o r exploiting thread-level parallelism o n a processor. This architectural model adopts a thread pipelining execut ion model that allows threads with data dependences and control dependences to be executed in parallel. The basic idea of thread pipelining i s t o compute and forward recurrence data and possible dependent store addresses t o the next thread as soon as possible, so the next thread can start execution and perform runtame data dependence checking. Thread pipelining also forces contiguous threads t o perform their m e m o y write-backs in order, which enables the compiler t o fork threads with control speculation. With run-time support for data dependence checking and control speculation, the superthreaded architectural model can exploit loop-level parallelism f r o m a broad range of applications.