Performance Scalability of Decoupled Software Pipelining [abstract] (PDF)
Ram Rangan, Neil Vachharajani, Guilherme Ottoni, and David I. August
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), Volume 5, Number 2, August 2008.

Any successful solution to using multi-core processors to scale general-purpose program performance will have to contend with rising inter-core communication costs while exposing coarsegrained parallelism. Recently proposed pipelined multithreading (PMT) techniques have been demonstrated to have general-purpose applicability and are also able to effectively tolerate intercore latencies through pipelined inter-thread communication. These desirable properties make PMT techniques strong candidates for program parallelization on current and future multi-core processors and understanding their performance characteristics is critical to their deployment.

To that end, this paper evaluates the performance scalability of a general-purpose PMT technique called decoupled software pipelining (DSWP) and presents a thorough analysis of the communication bottlenecks that must be overcome for optimal DSWP scalability.