Sentinel scheduling for VLIW and superscalar processors

  • Authors:
  • Scott A. Mahlke;William Y. Chen;Wen-mei W. Hwu;B. Ramakrishna Rau;Michael S. Schlansker

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ASPLOS V Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
  • Year:
  • 1992

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Abstract

Speculative execution is an important source of parallelism for VLIW and superscalar processors. A serious challenge with compiler-controlled speculative execution is to accurately detect and report all program execution errors at the time of occurrence. In this paper, a set of architectural features and compile-time scheduling support referred to as sentinel scheduling is introduced. Sentinel scheduling provides an effective framework for compiler-controlled speculative execution that accurately detects and reports all exceptions. Sentinel scheduling also supports speculative execution of store instructions by providing a store buffer which allows probationary entries. Experimental results show that sentinel scheduling is highly effective for a wide range of VLIW and superscalar processors.