Helper thread prefetching for loosely-coupled multiprocessor systems

This paper presents a helper thread prefetching scheme that is designed to work on loosely-coupled processors, such as in a standard chip multi-processor (CMP) system and in an intelligent memory system. Loosely-coupled processors have an advantage in that fine-grain resources, such as processor and L1 cache resources, are not contended by the application and helper threads, hence preserving the speed of the application. However, inter-processor communication is expensive in such a system. We present techniques to alleviate this. Our approach exploits large loop-based code regions and is based on a new synchronization mechanism between the application and helper threads. This mechanism precisely controls how far ahead the execution of the helper thread can be with respect to the application thread. We found that this is important in ensuring prefetching timeliness and avoiding cache pollution. To demonstrate that prefetching in a loosely-coupled system can be done effectively, we ev...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Changhee Jung, Daeseob Lim, Jaejin Lee, Yan Solihin
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Helper Thread, Intelligent Memory, IPPS 2006, Loosely-coupled Processors