Evaluating multi-threading in the prototype XMT environment

XMT is a multi-threaded programming model designed toexploit explicit specification of parallel threads. Its main
features are a simple thread execution model and an efficient
prefix-sum instruction for synchronizing shared data accesses.
This paper presents and evaluates the performance of multi-
threading in the XMT programming environment. A
prototype XMT compiler converts parallel regions into
procedure calls, which are then executed efficiently in XMT
hardware. An architecture simulator similar to SimpleScalar
is used to evaluate the performance of the XMT system for
twelve benchmark codes. Results show the XMT architecture
generally succeeds in providing low-overhead parallel threads
and uniform access times on-chip. However, compiler
optimizations to cluster (coarsen) threads are still needed for
very fine-grained threads.