Superscalar communication: A runtime optimization for distributed applications  

作　　者：LI HuiBa , LIU ShengYun, PENG YuXing, LI DongSheng, ZHOU HangJun & LU XiCheng National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China 

出　　处：《Science China(Information Sciences)》2010年第10期1931-1946,共16页中国科学（信息科学）（英文版）

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants Nos. 60703072, 60673167);the Funds for Creative Research Groups of China (Grants No. 60621003);the National Basic Research Programof China (Grant No. 2005CB321801)

摘　　要：Building distributed applications is difficult mostly because of concurrency management. Existing approaches primarily include events and threads. Researchers and developers have been debating for decades to prove which is superior. Although the conclusion is far from obvious, this long debate clearly shows that neither of them is perfect. One of the problems is that they are both complex and error-prone. Both events and threads need the programmers to explicitly manage concurrencies, and we believe it is just the source of difficulties. In this paper, we propose a novel approach--superscalar communication, in which concurrencies are automatically managed by the runtime system. It dynamically analyzes the programs to discover potential con- currency opportunities; and it dynamically schedules the communication and the computation tasks, resulting in automatic concurrent execution. This approach is inspired by the idea of superscalar technology in mod- ern microprocessors, which dynamically exploits instruction-level parallelism. However, hardware superscMar algorithms do not fit software in many aspects, thus we have to design a new scheme completely from scratch. Superscalar communication is a runtime extension with no modification to the language, compiler or byte code, so it is good at backward compatibility. Superscalar communication is likely to begin a brand new research area in systems software, which is characterized by dynamic optimization for networking programs.Building distributed applications is difficult mostly because of concurrency management. Existing approaches primarily include events and threads. Researchers and developers have been debating for decades to prove which is superior. Although the conclusion is far from obvious, this long debate clearly shows that neither of them is perfect. One of the problems is that they are both complex and error-prone. Both events and threads need the programmers to explicitly manage concurrencies, and we believe it is just the source of difficulties. In this paper, we propose a novel approach--superscalar communication, in which concurrencies are automatically managed by the runtime system. It dynamically analyzes the programs to discover potential con- currency opportunities; and it dynamically schedules the communication and the computation tasks, resulting in automatic concurrent execution. This approach is inspired by the idea of superscalar technology in mod- ern microprocessors, which dynamically exploits instruction-level parallelism. However, hardware superscMar algorithms do not fit software in many aspects, thus we have to design a new scheme completely from scratch. Superscalar communication is a runtime extension with no modification to the language, compiler or byte code, so it is good at backward compatibility. Superscalar communication is likely to begin a brand new research area in systems software, which is characterized by dynamic optimization for networking programs.

关 键 词：network PROGRAMMING CONCURRENCY EVENT THREAD SUPERSCALAR 

分 类 号：TP393.02[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术]