XMT-M: A Scalable Decentralized Processor

A defining challenge for research in computer science and engineering has been the ongoing quest for reducing the completion time of a single computation task. Even outside the parallel processing communities, there is little doubt that the key to further progress in this quest is to do parallel processing of some kind. A recently proposed parallel processing framework that spans the entire spectrum from (parallel) algorithms to architecture to implementation is the explicit multi-threading (XMT) framework. This framework provides: (i) simple and natural parallel algorithms for essentially every general-purpose application, including notoriously difficult irregular integer applications, and (ii) a multi-threaded programming model for these algorithms which allows an "independence-of-order" semantics: every thread can proceed at its own speed, independent of other concurrent threads. To the extent possible, the XMT framework uses established ideas in parallel processing. This paper pre..