T. Bernard, K. Bousias, B. de Geus, M. Lankamp, L. Zhang, A. Pimentel, P.M.W. Knijnenburg and C.R. Jesshope
Computer Systems Architecture Group, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A novel form of ILP based on code fragmentation, first proposed some years ago, is being used for novel CMP processor designs. The technique, called microthreading, enables binary compatibility across arbitrary schedules. Chip architectures have been proposed that contain many simple pipelines with hardware support for ultra- fast context switching. The concurrency described in the binary code is parametric and a typical microthread is an iteration of a loop. The ISA contains instructions to create a family of micro-threads, i.e., the collection of all loop iterations. In case a microthread encounters a (possibly) long latency operation (e.g., a load that may miss in the cache) this thread is switched out and another thread is switched in under program control. In this way, latencies can effectively be hidden, if there are a sufficient number of threads available. The creation of families of threads is the responsibility of the compiler. In this presentation, we give an overview of the microthreaded model of computation and we show by some small examples that it provides an efficient way of executing loops. Moreover, we show that this model has excellent scaling properties. Finally, we discuss the compiler support required and propose some compiler transformations that can be used to expose large families of threads.

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