Improving Microprocessor Performance and Energy-efficiency by Exploiting OS-aware Architecture Design February 26 (Thursday) (CII 4050; Refreshments at 9:30am; Talk at 10am) Tao Li, UT Austin Improving Microprocessor Performance and Energy-efficiency by Exploiting OS-aware Architecture Design The Operating System (OS) which manages both hardware and software resources, constitutes a major component of today's complex systems. Many modern and emerging workloads (e.g., database, web servers and file/e-mail applications) exercise the OS significantly. However, microprocessor designs and (performance/power) optimizations have largely been driven by the user-level applications. In this talk, I will present the advantages and benefits of integrating OS component in processor architecture design. In the first part of my talk, I will show how control flow prediction hardware, which is critically to deliver instruction level parallel (ILP) and pipelining performance on today's highly-speculative and deeply-pipelined machine, can be cost-effectively adapted to significantly improve its speculation accuracy on the exception-driven, intermittent OS execution. In the second part of my talk, I will address the adaptations of processor resources to reduce OS power on today's high-complexity processors, which exploit aggressive hardware design to maximize the performance across a wide range of targeted applications. Tao Li is currently a Ph.D. candidate (in Computer Engineering) at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include computer and system architecture, operating systems, energy-efficient design, modeling, simulation and evaluation of computer systems and hardware system prototyping. | |
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