Mehmet Altan Açıkgöz Ercan Saraç CMPE 511 Multithreading Mehmet Altan Açıkgöz Ercan Saraç

Outline Multithreading Thread scheduling policies Grain multithreading Design choices Multi threading architecture Out-of-order superscalar processor Simultaneous multithreading From superscalar to SMT SMT design issues

Pipeline Hazards Without bypassing, need interlocks LW r1, 0(r2) ADDI r5, r5, #12 SW 12(r1), r5 Each instruction may depend on the next Without bypassing, need interlocks Bypassing cannot completely eliminate interlocks or delay slots

Multithreading How can we guarantee no dependencies between instructions in a pipeline? One way is to interleave execution of instructions from different program threads on same pipeline Interleave 4 threads, T1-T4, on non-bypassed 5-stage pipe T1: LW r1, 0(r2) T2: ADD r7, r1, r4 T3: XORI r5, r4, #12 T4: SW 0(r7), r5 T1: LW r5, 12(r1)

CDC 6600 Peripheral Processors (Cray, 1965) First multithreaded hardware 10 “virtual” I/O processors fixed interleave on simple pipeline pipeline has 100ns cycle time each processor executes one instruction every 1000ns accumulator-based instruction set to reduce processor state The 6600 CDC included 10 parallel functional units, allowing multiple instructions to be worked on at the same time. Today this is known as a superscalar design, while at the time it was simply "unique". The system read and decoded instructions from memory as fast as possible, generally faster than they could be completed, and fed them off to the units for processing.

Simple Multithreaded Pipeline General purpose registers (GPRs) can store both data and addresses, i.e., they are combined Data/Address registers. Have to carry thread select down pipeline to ensure correct state bits read/written at each pipe stage

Multithreading Costs Appears to software (including OS) as multiple slower CPUs Each thread requires its own user state GPRs PC Also, needs own OS control state virtual memory page table base register exception handling registers Other costs? General purpose registers (GPRs) can store both data and addresses, i.e., they are combined Data/Address registers.

Thread Scheduling Policies Fixed interleave (CDC 6600 PPUs, 1965) each of N threads executes one instruction every N cycles if thread not ready to go in its slot, insert pipeline bubble Software-controlled interleave (TI ASC PPUs, 1971) OS allocates S pipeline slots amongst N threads hardware performs fixed interleave over S slots, executing whichever thread is in that slot Hardware-controlled thread scheduling (HEP, 1982) hardware keeps track of which threads are ready to go picks next thread to execute based on hardware priority scheme The Advanced Scientific Computer, or ASC, was a supercomputer architecture designed by Texas Instruments (TI) between 1966 and 1973. Key to the ASC's design was a single high-speed shared memory, which was accessed by a number of processors and channel controllers, in a fashion similar to Seymour Cray's groundbreaking CDC 6600. One key difference was that the CPU was split in two, the operating system ran on the "peripheral processor", while applications were run on the dedicated, slave, ALU, which they referred to as "the" CPU. The ALU/CPU was one of the first to include vector processing instructions. The Heterogeneous Element Processor (HEP) was introduced by Denelcor in 1982 as the world's first commercial MIMD computer. A HEP system, as the name implies, was pieced together from many heterogeneous components -- processors, data memory modules, and I/O modules. The components were connected via a switched network.

What “Grain” Multithreading? So far assumed fine-grained multithreading CPU switches every cycle to a different thread Coarse-grained multithreading CPU switches every few cycles to a different thread

Multithreading Design Choices Context switch to another thread every cycle, or on hazard or L1 miss or L2 miss or network request Per-thread state and context-switch overhead Interactions between threads in memory hierarchy

Denelcor HEP (Burton Smith, 1982) First commercial machine to use hardware threading in main CPU 120 threads per processor 10 MHz clock rate Up to 8 processors precursor to Tera MTA (Multithreaded Architecture)

Tera MTA Overview Up to 256 processors Up to 128 active threads per processor Processors and memory modules populate a sparse 3D torus interconnection fabric Flat, shared main memory No data cache Sustains one main memory access per cycle per processor 50W/processor @ 260MHz

MTA Instruction Format Three operations packed into 64-bit instruction word (short VLIW) One memory operation, one arithmetic operation, plus one arithmetic or branch operation Memory operations incur ~150 cycles of latency Explicit 3-bit “lookahead” field in instruction gives number of subsequent instructions (0-7) that are independent of this one c.f. Instruction grouping in VLIW allows fewer threads to fill machine pipeline used for variable- sized branch delay slots Thread creation and termination instructions

MTA Multithreading Each processor supports 128 active hardware threads 128 SSWs, 1024 target registers, 4096 general-purpose registers Every cycle, one instruction from one active thread is launched into pipeline Instruction pipeline is 21 cycles long At best, a single thread can issue one instruction every 21 cycles Clock rate is 260MHz, effective single thread issue rate is 260/21 = 12.4MHz

MTA Pipeline Although the memory in the MTA is physically distributed, the system is emphatically presented as a shared memory machine (with non-uniform access time). The latency incurred in memory references is hidden by multi-threading, i.e., usually many concurrent program threads (instruction streams) may be active at any time. Therefore, when for instance a load instruction cannot be satisfied because of memory latency the thread requesting this operation is stalled and another thread of which an operation can be done is switched into execution. This switching between program threads only takes 1 cycle. As there may be up to 128 instruction streams and 8 memory references can be issued without waiting for preceding ones, a latency of 1024 cycles can be tolerated. References that are stalled are retried from a retry pool.

Coarse-Grain Multithreading Tera MTA designed for supercomputing applications with large data sets and low locality No data cache Many parallel threads needed to hide large memory latency Other applications are more cache friendly Few pipeline bubbles when cache getting hits Just add a few threads to hide occasional cache miss latencies Swap threads on cache misses

MIT Alewife Modified SPARC chips Up to four threads per node register windows hold different thread contexts Up to four threads per node Thread switch on local cache miss SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a RISC microprocessor instruction set architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems

IBM PowerPC RS64-III (Pulsar) Commercial coarse-grain multithreading CPU Based on PowerPC with quad-issue in-order fivestage pipeline Each physical CPU supports two virtual CPUs On L2 cache miss, pipeline is flushed and execution switches to second thread short pipeline minimizes flush penalty (4 cycles), small compared to memory access latency flush pipeline to simplify exception handling The Pulsar was introduced in 1999 at 450 MHz with an 8 MB DDR SRAM L2 running at 450 MHz effective data rate on a 256 bit bus. On-chip L1 was increased to 256 KB total. Branch prediction was improved and branch misprediction penalty reduced to 0 or 1 cycles.

Speculative, Out-of-Order Superscalar Processor Superscalar processing is the ability to initiate multiple instructions during the same cycle. It aims at producing ever faster microprocessors. A typical superscalar processor fetches and decodes several instructions at a time. Instructions are executed in parallel based on the availability of operand data rather than their original program sequence. Upon completion instructions are re-sequenced so that they can be used to update the process state in the correct program order.

Out-Of-Order Execution Why Out-Of-Order Execution? In-order Processors Stalls Pipeline may not be full because of the frequent stalls Example: Allow In the Out-Of-Order Processors - No dependency Move the Instruction for execution - Means the Instructions that are Ready

Out-of-order processors This new paradigm breaks up the processing of instructions into these steps: Instruction fetch. Instruction dispatch to an instruction queue (also called instruction buffer or reservation stations). The instruction waits in the queue until its input operands are available. The instruction is then allowed to leave the queue before earlier, older instructions. The instruction is issued to the appropriate functional unit and executed by that unit. The results are queued. When all older results have been written back to the register file, then this result is written back to the register file. This is called the graduation or retire stage. The key concept of OoO processing is to allow the processor to avoid a class of stalls that occur when the data needed to perform an operation is not available. In the outline above, the OoO processor avoids the stall that occurs in step (2) of the in-order processor when the instruction is not completely ready to be processed due to missing data

Issue Queues A list of pending instructions is kept and each cycle these queues select from these instructions as their input data are ready. Queues issue instructions speculatively and older instructions are given priority over newer in the queue. An issue queue entry becomes available when the instruction issues or is squashed due to mis-speculation. Superscalar processing is the ability to initiate multiple instructions during the same cycle. It aims at producing ever faster microprocessors. A typical superscalar processor fetches and decodes several instructions at a time. Instructions are executed in parallel based on the availability of operand data rather than their original program sequence. Upon completion instructions are re-sequenced so that they can be used to update the process state in the correct program order.

Superscalar Machine Efficiency

Vertical Multithreading Cycle-by-cycle interleaving of second thread removes vertical waste

Ideal Multithreading for Superscalar Interleave multiple threads to multiple issue slots with no restrictions

Simultaneous Multithreading Allows multiple threads to execute different instructions in the same clock cycle, using the execution units that the first thread left spare. The main additions needed are the ability to fetch instructions from multiple threads in a cycle, and a larger register file to hold data from multiple threads. Normal multithreading operating systems allow multiple processes and threads to utilize the processor one at a time, giving exclusive ownership to a particular thread for a time slice in the order of milliseconds - this is called Temporal multithreading. Quite often, a process will stall for hundreds of cycles while waiting for some external resource (for example, a RAM load), thus lowering processor efficiency. A successive improvement is super-threading, where the processor can execute instructions from a different thread each cycle. Thus cycles left unused by a thread can be used by another that is ready to run.

Simultaneous Multithreading Add multiple contexts and fetch engines to wide out-of-order superscalar processor OOO instruction window already has most of the circuitry required to schedule from multiple threads Any single thread can utilize whole machine

Comparison of Issue Capabilities

From Superscalar to SMT SMT is an out-of-order superscalar extended with hardware to support multiple executing threads

From Superscalar to SMT Extra pipeline stages for accessing thread-shared register files

From Superscalar to SMT Fetch from the two highest throughput threads.

From Superscalar to SMT Small items per-thread program counters per-thread return stacks per-thread bookkeeping for instruction retirement, trap & instruction dispatch queue flush thread identifiers, e.g., with BTB & TLB entries

Simultaneous Multithreaded Processor

SMT Design Issues Which thread to fetch from next? Locks Don’t want to clog instruction window with thread with many stalls  try to fetch from thread that has fewest insts in window Locks Virtual CPU spinning on lock executes many instructions but gets nowhere  add ISA support to lower priority of thread spinning on lock

Intel Pentium-4 Xeon Processor Hyperthreading == SMT Dual physical processors, each 2-way SMT Logical processors share nearly all resources of the physical processor Caches, execution units, branch predictors When one logical processor is stalled, the other can make progress No logical processor can use all entries in queues when two threads are active A processor running only one active software thread to run at the same speed with or without hyperthreading

References The anatomy of a modern superscalar processor, Constantinos Kourouyiannis, Madhava Rao Andagunda www.wikipedia.org http://www.netlib.org/utk/papers/advanced-computers Multithreading, L.N. Bhuyan