Design of storage hierarchy in multithreaded architectures

Multithreaded execution models attempt to combine some aspects of dataflow-like execution with von Neumann model execution. Their main objective is to mask the latency of inter-processor communications and remote memory accesses in large scale multiprocessors. An important issue in the analysis and evaluation of multithreaded execution is the design and performance of the storage hierarchy. Because of the sequential execution of threads, the locality of access within an executing thread can be exploited using registers and cache. At the inter-thread level, however, the locality of accesses to memory and its effect on the cache is not yet well understood. A storage model which can exploit this locality is developed and evaluated. The results indicate there is a large amount of inter-thread locality that can be exploited and that we can get an efficient storage system by exploiting the characteristics of nonblocking threads.