Software Data-Triggered Threads

The data-triggered threads (DTT) programming and execution model can increase parallelism and eliminate redundant compu-tation. However, the initial proposal requires signicant architec-ture support, which impedes existing applications and architectures from taking advantage of this model. This work proposes a pure software solution that supports the DTT model without any hardware support. This research uses a prototype compiler and runtime libraries running on top of existing machines. Several enhancements to the initial software implemen-tation are presented, which further improve the performance. The software runtime system improves the performance of se-rial C SPEC benchmarks by 15 % on a Nehalem processor, but by over 7X over the full suite of single-thread applications. It is shown that the DTT model can work in conjunction with traditional paral-lelism. The DTT model provides up to 64X speedup over parallel applications exploiting traditional parallelism. 1