Finding and Exploiting Memory-Level-Parallelism in Constrained Speculative Architectures

Sammanfattning: One of the main performance bottlenecks of processors today is the discrepancy between processor and memory speed, known as the memory wall. While the processor executes instructions at a high pace, the memory is too slow to provide data in a timely manner. Load instructions that require an access to memory are referred to as long-latency or delinquent loads. To prevent the processor from stalling, independent instruction past the load may execute, including independent loads. Overlapping load operations and thus their latency is referred to as memory-level parallelism. Memory-level parallelism (MLP) can significantly improve performance. Today's out-of-order processors are therefore equipped with complex hardware that allows them to look into the future and to select independent loads that can be overlapped. However, the ability to choose future instructions and speculatively execute them in advance introduces complexity, increased power consumption and potential security risks. In this thesis we look at constrained speculative architectures that struggle to hide memory latencies as they are constrained by design, by their resources, or by security. We investigate ways for the compiler to help them in finding MLP, with the ultimate goal to avoid processor stalls as much as possible. This includes small energy-efficient processors that lack the ability to look-ahead far enough to find independent loads, but also large processors that are disallowed to speculatively execute independent loads due to enforced security measures to circumvent side-channel attacks. We identify the reason for their limitation and propose software transformations and hardware extensions to overcome their restrictions.