SMALL: A Scalable Multithreaded Architecture to Exploit Large Locality

Multithreaded architectures follow a hybrid evaluation based on von Neumann computation model and data-driven evaluation to combine the advantages of both execution paradigms. In this paper we propose a multithreaded architecture that (i) performs synchronization efficiently by following a layered approach, (ii) exploits larger locality by using large, resident activations, and (iii) reduces the number of load stalls with the help of a novel high-speed buffer organization. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated using deterministic discrete-event simulation. Initial simulation results indicate that the proposed architecture can achieve high performance in terms of both speedup and processor utilization. 1 Introduction Hybrid von Neumann/dataflow architectures [1, 2, 6, 9, 12, 13, 17] have the potential to satisfy the increasing demands on very high computation speed. In the hybrid computation model, a program is a partially ordered graph of nodes. The nodes, called ..