This paper discusses current network technologies and protocols and presents a simulation study of the most common networking protocol used today, TCP/IP. The TCP/IP protocol stack has many inherent problems that will be shown through this simulation study. Using the SimpleScalar Toolset, the significance of the data copying and checksumming...
Modern superscalar processors exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP) by issuing multiple instructions in a single cycle because of increasing demand for higher performance in computing. However, stalls due to cache misses severely degrade the performance by disturbing the exploitation of ILP. Multiprocessors also greatly exacerbate the memory latency problem. In SMPs,...
This dissertation investigates diverse techniques to support multithreading in modern high performance processors. The mechanisms studied expand the architecture of a high performance superscalar processor to control efficiently the interaction between software-controlled and hardware-controlled multithreading. Additionally, dynamic speculative mechanisms are proposed to exploit thread-level-parallelism (TLP) and instruction-level-parallelism (ILP) on a...
High bandwidth of networks demands high performance communication processors that integrate application processing, network processing, and system support functions into a single, low cost System-On-Chip (SOC) solution. However, conventional processors, when used in network related applications, are beset by the overhead of save/restore of register context, cache misses due to...
This dissertation investigates the use of a hardware mechanism called Eager Data Transfer (EDT) for achieving the reduction of communication latency for user-level network protocol. To reach the goal, the dissertation addresses the following research issues. First, the development of a communication system performance evaluation tool called Linux/SimOS is presented....