CAREER: Future Values: Reshaping the Future of Instruction Level Parallelism

Michigan Technological University, Houghton MI

Investigators

Abstract

CAREER: Future Values: Reshaping the Future of Instruction Level Parallelism Abstract This research aims at providing an effective solution to the fetch problem of instruction level parallel processors. With the concept of "future values", one can represent traditional programs in a new control-flow form such that on any control flow path the data-flow aspect of the computation is either traditional (i.e., definition of a value precedes its consumers), or reversed (i.e., consumers of a value precedes its definition). The representation hence allows ordering of instructions even when the data dependencies would prohibit doing so in a control-flow graph. As a result, it is possible to seamlessly exploit control independence, use predication to eliminate any branch instruction, and design processors, which can reuse the internally generated dataflow graph as another source of instructions. This approach has the potential to significantly impact the design of processors and optimizing compilers, and positively affect every field of science and commerce that relies on processor performance. The project will also result in course materials and software tool sets that will be made publicly available. Finally, the project will contribute greatly to the development of the recently initiated Computer Science Ph.D. program at Michigan Technological University.