9805216 Kavi, Krishna M. University of Alabama in Huntsville CISE Postdoctoral Experimental Research for the Evaluation of Multithreaded Architectures Recent trends in technology have resulted in a widening of the performance gap between memory and processors. Multithreading has been touted as the solution to minimize the loss of CPU cycles due to memory latency by executing several instruction streams simultaneously. Over the past several years, the PI has been investigating multithreaded architectures, both based on dataflow paradigm and hybrid dataflow-control flow paradigms. This research led to the introduction of cache memories for dataflow architectures, coherent I-structure cache memories, and staggered allocation of DOACROSS loops for multithreaded architectures. The post-doctoral researcher will extend the work on trace generation tools to generate sufficiently large instruction traces for dataflow and hybrid architectures. Whenever possible, traces for conventional architectures will be converted into traces for dataflow and multithreaded systems. This will aid the PI's research significantly in evaluating the applicability of the dataflow/hybrid models and new architectural innovations such as scheduled dataflow, and speculatively preloading thread contexts for a wider range of programming models and applications. The successful completion of the research will have a broader impact on computer architecture research by facilitating the generation of large traces for innovative architectures without the need for compilers and runtime systems for experimentally evaluating the new architectures, and at the same time help to broaden the Postdoctoral Associate.
