CSci 8002 Introduction to Research in Computer Science Research Proposal and Plan Dynamic Performance Tuning for Assistant Threads

Microprocessors that support multiple threads of execution with multiple cores are becoming increasingly common. One way to improve the performance of modern applications on such platforms is to create performance enhancing assistant threads, such as speculative and prefetching threads. Although assistant threads can improve performance by exploiting different levels of parallelism, they may degrade performance when improperly deployed. Most existing approaches use compilers to orchestrate assistant threads. However, the runtime behavior, which cannot be accurately modeled by static analyses, may greatly affect the effectiveness of these threads. In my research plan, I propose to investigate and design hardware and software support to take advantage of the runtime performance profile and fine- tune assistant threads to improve the effectiveness of these threads.