High-quality operation binding for clustered VLIW datapaths

Abstract

Clustering is an effective method to increase the available parallelism in VLIW datapaths without incurring severe penalties associated with large numbers of register file ports. Efficient utilization of a clustered datapath requires careful binding of operations to clusters. The paper proposes a binding algorithm that effectively explores tradeoffs between in-cluster operation serialization and delays associated with data transfers between clusters. Extensive experimental evidence is provided showing that the algorithm generates high quality solutions for basic blocks, with up to 29% improvement over a state-of-the-art advanced binding algorithm.