Integrated support to improve inter-thread communication and synchronization in a multithreaded processor

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated compiler, runtime control, and hardware solution to improve inter-thread communication and synchronization in a multithreaded processor architecture. Multithreading improves processor utilization by exploiting more parallelism. The improvement in utilization, however, is hindered by interthread communication and synchronization problems, which incur extra communication overhead and thus degrade the performance of the system. In this paper, we propose efficient inter-thread communication and synchronization schemes based on a superscalar DLX processor with multithreading functionality. Compiler, runtime control, and hardware support used in the schemes are discussed. Simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.