Adaptive fork-heuristics for software thread-level speculation

Abstract

Fork-heuristics play a key role in software Thread-Level Speculation (TLS). Current fork-heuristics either lack real parallel execution environment information to accurately evaluate fork points and/or focus on hardware-TLS implementation which cannot be directly applied to software TLS. This paper proposes adaptive fork-heuristics as well as a feedback-based selection technique to overcome the problems. Adaptive fork-heuristics insert and speculate on all potential fork/join points and purely rely on the runtime system to disable inappropriate ones. Feedback-based selection produces parallelized programs with ideal speedups using log files generated by adaptive heuristics. Experiments of three scientific computing benchmarks on a 64-core machine show that feedback-based selection and adaptive heuristics achieve more than 88 % and 50 % speedups of the manual-parallel version, respectively. For the Barnes-Hut benchmark, feedback-based selection is 49 % faster than the manual-parallel version. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.