ASPLOS

Programming Languages and Operating Systems introduce abstractions which allow the programmer to ignore details of an implementation. Support of an abstraction must not only concentrate on promoting the efficiency of an implementation, but also on ...

Multiprocessors have long been of interest to computer community. They provide the potential for accelerating applications through parallelism and increased throughput for large multi-user system. Three factors have limited the commercial success of ...

We have designed and implemented a software facility, called Agora, that supports the development of parallel applications written in multiple languages. At the core of Agora there is a mechanism that allows concurrent computations to share data ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of virtual memory management within the CMU Mach Operating System and the experiences gained by the Mach kernel group in porting that system to a variety of architectures. As of this writing, Mach runs ...

We have developed a simple direct execution architecture for a 32 bit Forth microprocessor. The processor can directly access a linear address space of over 4 gigawords. Two instruction types are defined; a subroutine call, and a user defined microcode ...

One of the major factors that distinguishes LISP from many other languages (Pascal, C, Fortran, etc.) is the need for run-time type checking. Run-time type checking is implemented by adding to each data object a tag that encodes type information. Tags ...

One potential disadvantage of a machine with a reduced instruction set is that object programs may be substantially larger than those for a machine with a richer, more complex instruction set. The main reason is that a small instruction set will require ...

The Xerox PARC Dragon is a VLSI research computer that uses several techniques to achieve dense code and fast procedure calls in a system that can support multiple processors on a central high bandwidth memory bus.

A multiprocessor cache memory system is described that supplies data to the processor based on virtual addresses, but maintains consistency in the main memory, both across caches and across virtual address spaces. Pages in the same or different address ...

We wish to determine the effectiveness of some simple hardware for debugging and profiling compiled programs on a conventional processor. The hardware cost is small -- a counter decremented on each instruction that raises an exception when its value ...

In this paper we describe an experimental coprocessor for an IBM 4381 that is designed to facilitate the exploration of persistent objects.

In recent years, many architectural design efforts have focused on maximizing performance for frequently executed, simple instructions. Although these efforts have resulted in machines with better average price/performance ratios, certain complex ...

Division of a compiler into a front end and a back end that communicate via an intermediate language is a well-known technique. We go farther and use the intermediate language as the official description of a family of machines with simple instruction ...

This paper studies two compilation techniques for enhancing scalar performance in high-speed scientific processors: software pipelining and loop unrolling. We study the impact of the architecture (size of the register file) and of the hardware (size of ...

The Smalltalk On A RISC project at U. C. Berkeley proves that a high-level object-oriented language can attain high performance on a modified reduced instruction set architecture. The single most important optimization is the removal of a layer of ...

Programs naturally require a variety of memory-addressing modes. It isn't necessary to provide them in hardware, however, if a compiler can synthesize them from a few primitive modes. This not only simplifies the hardware, but also permits the compiler ...

Given an instruction set, the superoptimizer finds the shortest program to compute a function. Startling programs have been generated, many of them engaging in convoluted bit-fiddling bearing little resemblance to the source programs which defined the ...

We evaluated a Prolog machine PSI (Personal Sequential Inference machine) for the purpose of improving and redesigning it. In this evaluation, we measured the execution speed and the dynamic characteristics of cache memory, register file, and branching ...

This paper compares the performance of executing compiled Prolog code on two different architectures under development at U. C. Berkeley. The first is the PLM, a special-purpose CISC architecture intended as a coprocessor for a host machine. The second ...

The G-machine is a language-directed processor architecture designed to support graph reduction as a model of computation. It can carry out lazy evaluation of functional language programs and can evaluate programs in which logical variables are used. To ...

Firefly is a shared-memory multiprocessor workstation that contains from one to seven MicroVAX 78032 processors, each with a floating point unit and a sixteen kilobyte cache. The caches are coherent, so that all processors see a consistent view of main ...

The VAX 8800 family (models 8800, 8700, 8550), currently the fastest computers in the VAX product line, achieve their speed through a combination of fast cycle time and deep pipelining. Rather than pipeline highly variable VAX instructions as such, the ...

Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures were promised to deliver far more than the factor of two or three that current architectures achieve from overlapped execution. Using a new type of compiler which compacts ordinary sequential code into long ...

Specialized computer architectures can provide better price/performance for executing image processing and graphics applications than general purpose designs. Two processors are presented that use parallel SIMD data paths to support common graphics data ...

The Astronautics ZS-1 is a high speed, 64-bit computer system designed for scientific and engineering applications. The ZS-1 central processor uses a decoupled architecture, which splits instructions into two streams---one for fixed point/memory address ...