Exploiting Instruction Level Parallelism in the Presence of Conditional Branches
Mahlke, Scott Alan
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81169
Description
Title
Exploiting Instruction Level Parallelism in the Presence of Conditional Branches
Author(s)
Mahlke, Scott Alan
Issue Date
1997
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Hwu, Wen-Mei W.
Department of Study
Electrical Engineering
Discipline
Electrical Engineering
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Computer Science
Language
eng
Abstract
For many applications, speculative execution alone is not sufficient to achieve high performance. The fundamental limitation is that speculation only removes dependences between branches and other instructions. The branches themselves remain in the code, which causes difficult problems. This motivates the second technique investigated in this dissertation, predicated execution, which is an architectural capability that enables the conditional execution of instructions based on the value of a Boolean source operand. Predicated execution allows a compiler to eliminate branch instructions using this conditional execution support. Additionally, predicated execution provides an efficient interface for the compiler to overlap the execution of multiple paths of control. Predicated execution is exploited in the compiler via a generalized form of a superblock, called the hyperblock. Hyperblocks provide the framework for the compiler to selectively eliminate branches using predicated execution as well as apply speculative execution to exploit ILP.
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