Constructing Virtual Architectures on a Tiled Processor

• Authors: David Wentzlaff;Anant Agarwal
• Venue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization
• Year: 2006

As the amount of available silicon resources on one chip increases, we have seen the advent of ever increasing parallel resources integrated on-chip. Many architectures use these resources as individually controllable, parallel processing elements. While such architectures excel at parallel applications, they seldom support legacy single-threaded applications. In this work, we propose using parallel resources to facilitate execution of legacy codes with acceptable performance on parallel architectures containing a drastically different instruction set through the use of an all software parallel dynamic binary translation engine. This engine spatially implements different portions of a superscalar processor across distinct parallel elements thus exploiting the pipeline parallelism inherent in a superscalar. This virtual microarchitecture facilitates changing the allocation of silicon resources between different superscalar units in software which is not possible when special purpose physical resources are built. We propose building dynamically reconfigurable architectures that inspect the current virtual machine configuration along with the dynamic instruction stream and change the configuration to best suit the program's needs at runtime. An x86 to Raw parallel translation engine was built in which tiles dedicated to translation can be traded for tiles dedicated to the memory system as an example of dynamic reconfiguration.