ISA EXTENSIONS FOR SYNCHRONOUS COALESCED ACCESSES

摘要

Global synchrony changes the way computers can be programmed. A new class of ISA level instructions (the globally-synchronous load-store) of the present invention is presented. In the context of multiple load-store machines, the globally synchronous load- store architecture allows the programmer to think about a collection of independent load-store machines as a single load-store machine. These ISA instructions may be applied to a distributed matrix transpose or other data that exhibit a high degree of data non-locality and difficulty in efficiently parallelizing on modern computer system architectures. Included in the new ISA instructions are a setup instruction and a synchronous coalescing access instruction ("sea"). The setup instruction configures a head processor to set up a global map that corresponds processor data contiguously to the memory. The "sea" instruction configures processors to block processor threads until respective times on a global clock, derived from the global map, to access the memory.