Jani Paakkulainen
ABSTRACT
Programming multicore systems is currently considered very difficult. One reason is that those are mostly constructed from the hardware point of view. Many of the processor core design solutions in contemporary constructions emphasize execution speed of a single thread. Since the memory access delay is the real bottleneck, such techniques often aim at maximizing cache hits by programmer guided locality of memory references and prefetching memory locations, etc.
In this paper, we consider constructing processor core solutions that support easy-to-use programming approach based on the PRAM model. Specifically, we consider a processor core design of a multicore system, where the aim is to amortize the memory access delays by having multiple simultaneous executable software threads per each processor core. The core switches the executed extremely light-weight thread at each step, and thus the core can wait for pending memory requests to complete without any penalty (as long as it has non-blocked threads). Moreover, we consider the core to support moving threads paradigm instead of traditional moving data paradigm. We present an outline of such a processor core architecture, where we change the traditional pipelined execution model of RISC.
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Index Terms
- Outline of RISC-based core for multiprocessor on chip architecture supporting moving threads
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