Reducing Context Switch Overhead with Compiler-Assisted Threading

Authors:
Pekka Jääskeläinen;Pertti Kellomäki;Jarmo Takala;Heikki Kultala;Mikael Lepistö
Affiliations:
-;-;-;-;-
Venue:
EUC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing - Volume 02
Year:
2008

Citing 0
Cited 1

Compiler support for lightweight context switching

ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO) - Special Issue on High-Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Multithreading is an important software modularization technique. However, it can incur substantial overheads, especially in processors where the amount of architecturally visible state is large. We propose an implementation technique for co-operative multithreading, where context switches occur in places that minimize the amount of state that needs to be saved. The subset of processor state saved during each context switch is based on where the switch occurs.We have validated the approach by an empirical study of resource usage in basic blocks, and by implementing the co-operative threading in our compiler. Performance figures are given for an MP3 player utilizing the threading implementation.