Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Improving Throughput Of Simultaneous Multithreaded (Smt) Processors Using Shareable Resource Signatures And Hardware Thread Priorities, Mitesh Ramesh Meswani

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) allows multiple hardware threads to execute concurrently on a processor core, potentially increasing the utilization and throughput of the processor core by a factor of the degree of multithreading. However, such performance gains may not be achieved due to contention for resources shared by the threads. Hardware thread priorities can be used to control the ratio of decode cycles allocated to the hardware threads of a processor core and, therefore, the degree of resource contention among the threads. The IBM POWER5, which has two hardware threads associated with each of its two cores, supports hardware thread priorities. …