We propose a multithreaded processor architecture for mapping a potentially unbounded number of software threads into a bounded number of hardware threads. Our architecture degrades a fork instruction gracefully into a function call when all hardware threads are in use, thereby adjusting thread granularity implicitly. This new architectural feature improves programmability by allowing programs to expose as much parallelism as is inherent in an application without incurring a performance penalty due to excess parallelism.
By: Volker Strumpen
Published in: RC24184 in 2007
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