Fuce: the continuation-based multithreading processor

ABSTRACT

Current trends of research on multithreading processors are the chip multithreading (CMT), which aims to exploit thread level parallelism (TLP) and to improve performance of software built onalltraditional threading components, e.g. pthreads. However, CMT is principally a straight forward extension of conventionalall symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) techniques, and it will suffer from the same limits to scalable multithreaded processing ifallit is built only on the traditional sequential-computation-based framework. Consideringallthese limitations of sequential-processor-basedallmultithreading, we are taking another approach to developing a multithreading processor dedicated to thread level parallelism(TLP). Our processor, named Fuce, is based on continuation-based multithreading. A thread is defined as a block of sequentially ordered instructions which areall executed exclusively. Every execution of a thread is triggered by one or more events, each of which is called continuation. The hardware cost and performance of the Fuce processor areallevaluated by means of a hardware implementation on FPGA and software simulation.

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Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Architectures

    • Other architectures

      • Data flow architectures

• Computing methodologies

  • Parallel computing methodologies

    • Parallel programming languages

• Hardware

  • Communication hardware, interfaces and storage

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language types

        • Parallel programming languages