Thread Warping: Dynamic and Transparent Synthesis of Thread Accelerators

• Authors: Greg Stitt;Frank Vahid
• Venue: ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
• Year: 2011

We introduce thread warping, a dynamic optimization technique that customizes multicore architectures to a given application by dynamically synthesizing threads into custom accelerator circuits on FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays). Thread warping builds upon previous dynamic synthesis techniques for single-threaded applications, enabling dynamic architectural adaptation to different amounts of thread-level parallelism, while also exploiting parallelism within each thread to further improve performance. Furthermore, thread warping maintains the important separation of function from architecture, enabling portability of applications to architectures with different quantities of microprocessors and FPGAs, an advantage not shared by static compilation/synthesis approaches. We introduce an approach consisting of CAD tools and operating system support that enables thread warping on potentially any microprocessor/FPGA architecture. We evaluate thread warping using a simulator for high-performance computing systems with different interconnections in addition to multicore embedded systems having between 4 and 64 ARM11 microprocessors. On average, thread warping achieved approximately 3x speedup compared to a high-performance quad-core Intel Xeon and 109x compared to an embedded system consisting of 4 ARM11 cores, with a size cost approximately equal to 36 ARM11 cores.