Integrated Temporal and Spatial Scheduling for Extended Operand Clustered VLIW Processors

摘要

Centralized register file architectures scale poorly in terms of clock rate,chip area,and power consumption and are thus not suitable for consumer electronic devices.The consequence is the emergence of architectures having many interconnected clusters each with a separate register file and a few functional units.Among the many inter-cluster communication models proposed,the extended operand model extends some of operand fields of instruction with a cluster specifier and allows an instruction to read some of the operands from other clusters without any extra cost. rnScheduling for clustered processors involves spatial concerns(where to schedule)as well as temporal concerns(when to schedule).A scheduler is responsible for resolving the conflicting requirements of aggressively exploiting the parallelism offered by hardware and limiting the communication among clusters to available slots.This paper proposes an integrated spatial and temporal scheduling algorithm for extended operand clustered VLIW processors and evaluates its effectiveness in improving the run time performance of the code without code size penalty.