SIGPLAN

Transactional Coherence and Consistency (TCC) offers a way to simplify parallel programming by executing all code within transactions. In TCC systems, transactions serve as the fundamental unit of parallel work, communication and coherence. As each ...

This paper describes a computer architecture, Spatial Computation (SC), which is based on the translation of high-level language programs directly into hardware structures. SC program implementations are completely distributed, with no centralized ...

We present a novel processor architecture designed specifically for use in low-power wireless sensor-network nodes. Our sensor network asynchronous processor (SNAP/LE) is based on an asynchronous data-driven 16-bit RISC core with an extremely low-power ...

Distributed Shortest-Positioning Time First (D-SPTF) is a request distribution protocol for decentralized systems of storage servers. D-SPTF exploits high-speed interconnects to dynamically select which server, among those with a replica, should service ...

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Federated Array of Bricks (FAB), a distributed disk array that provides the reliability of traditional enterprise arrays with lower cost and better scalability. FAB is built from a ...

We introduce Shear, a user-level software tool that characterizes RAID storage arrays. Shear employs a set of controlled algorithms combined with statistical techniques to automatically determine the important properties of a RAID system, including the ...

XOM-based secure processor has recently been introduced as a mechanism to provide copy and tamper resistant execution. XOM provides support for encryption/decryption and integrity checking. However, neither XOM nor any other current approach adequately ...

We present a simple architectural mechanism called dynamic information flow tracking that can significantly improve the security of computing systems with negligible performance overhead. Dynamic information flow tracking protects programs against ...

This paper explores a new technique called coherence decoupling, which breaks a traditional cache coherence protocol into two protocols: a Speculative Cache Lookup (SCL) protocol and a safe, backing coherence protocol. The SCL protocol produces a ...

Increased integration in the form of multiple processor cores on a single die, relatively constant die sizes, shrinking power envelopes, and emerging applications create a new challenge for processor architects. How to build a processor that provides ...

Pipeline flushes are becoming increasingly expensive in modern microprocessors with large instruction windows and deep pipelines. Selective re-execution is a technique that can reduce the penalty of mis-speculations by re-executing only instructions ...

Embedded software must meet conflicting requirements such as be-ing highly reliable, running on resource-constrained platforms, and being developed rapidly. Static program analysis can help meet all of these goals. People developing analyzers for ...

Helper threading is a technology to accelerate a program by exploiting a processor's multithreading capability to run ``assist'' threads. Previous experiments on hyper-threaded processors have demonstrated significant speedups by using helper threads to ...

Sampling has been successfully used to identify performance optimization opportunities. We would like to apply similar techniques to check program correctness. Unfortunately, sampling provides poor coverage of infrequently executed code, where bugs ...

As computer memory hierarchy becomes adaptive, its performance increasingly depends on forecasting the dynamic program locality. This paper presents a method that predicts the locality phases of a program by a combination of locality profiling and run-...

Memory can be efficiently utilized if the dynamic memory demands of applications can be determined and analyzed at run-time. The page miss ratio curve(MRC), i.e. page miss rate vs. memory size curve, is a good performance-directed metric to serve this ...

This paper introduces a compiler orchestrated prefetching system as a unified framework geared toward ameliorating the gap between processing speeds and memory access latencies. We focus the scope of the optimization on specific subsets of the program ...

Tracing garbage collectors traverse references from live program variables, transitively tracing out the closure of live objects. Memory accesses incurred during tracing are essentially random: a given object may contain references to any other object. ...

Maintenance is the dominant source of downtime at high availability sites. Unfortunately, the dominant mechanism for reducing this downtime, cluster rolling upgrade, has two shortcomings that have prevented its broad acceptance. First, cluster-style ...

Recent studies have suggested that the soft-error rate in microprocessor logic will become a reliability concern by 2010. This paper proposes an efficient error detection technique, called fingerprinting, that detects differences in execution across a ...

Trends in high-performance computing are making it necessary for long-running applications to tolerate hardware faults. The most commonly used approach is checkpoint and restart (CPR) - the state of the computation is saved periodically on disk, and ...

Multiple Clock Domain (MCD) processors are a promising future alternative to today's fully synchronous designs. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) in an MCD processor has the extra flexibility to adjust the voltage and frequency in each domain ...

Power density in high-performance processors continues to increase with technology generations as scaling of current, clock speed, and device density outpaces the downscaling of supply voltage and thermal ability of packages to dissipate heat. Power ...

Much research has been conducted on energy management for memory and disks. Most studies use control algorithms that dynamically transition devices to low power modes after they are idle for a certain threshold period of time. The control algorithms ...