"Speculative Versioning Cache"

T. N. Vijaykumar, Purdue University

ABSTRACT:

Dependences among loads and stores whose addresses are unknown hinder the extraction of instruction level parallelism during the execution of a sequential program. Such ambiguous memory dependences can be overcome by memory dependence speculation which enables a load or store to be speculatively executed before the addresses of preceding loads and stores are known. Furthermore, multiple speculative stores to a memory location create multiple speculative versions of the location. Program order among the speculative versions must be tracked to maintain sequential semantics. A previously proposed approach, the Address Resolution Buffer (ARB) uses a centralized buffer to support speculative versions. Our proposal, called the Speculative Versioning Cache (SVC), uses distributed caches to eliminate the latency and bandwidth problems of the ARB. The SVC conceptually unifies cache coherence and speculative versioning by using an organization similar to snooping bus-based coherent caches. A preliminary evaluation for the Multiscalar architecture shows that hit latency is an important factor affecting performance, and private cache solutions trade-off hit rate for hit latency.


BIO:

T. N. Vijaykumar joined the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1998 after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests are in computer architecture, VLSI microarchitectures, instruction level parallelism, processor and memory hierarchy hardware, and compiler optimizations.