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Department of Computer Science and Technology

Read more at: In Praise of Undergraduate Research

In Praise of Undergraduate Research

8 August 2019

In my last post I discussed the Janus automatic binary parallelisation tool that my postdoc, Kevin, has developed. At VEE earlier this year we had another paper on Janus , this time extending it to extract other forms of parallelism—automatic vectorisation for data-level parallelism and software prefetching for memory-level parallelism. We show how these schemes are applied to binaries in the context of Janus (with a neat trick for dealing with bounds-checking code when inserting prefetches to arrays) and evaluate them together. I’m not aware of any other work that tries to extract all three forms of parallelism at once. However, what I liked best about this paper was not the techniques, nor the results, but the fact that the two passes...


Read more at: Student Research Competition at EuroLLVM 2017

Student Research Competition at EuroLLVM 2017

29 March 2017

My student, Sam Ainsworth , has won first prize in the student research competition at EuroLLVM 2017 . This work was previously published at CGO 2017 and I’ve blogged about it too. Below is a copy of his poster, or download it here . Well done, Sam!


Read more at: Software Prefetching for Indirect Memory Accesses

Software Prefetching for Indirect Memory Accesses

23 February 2017

I’ve always considered software prefetching to be something of a black art. There have been times in the past when I’ve looked at my code, noticed a load is causing problems and tried inserting one or more software prefetches to alleviate the issue. Mostly this hasn’t worked, although I’ve never been sure why. In fact, even when it has worked I haven’t been totally sure why it has, usually because it’s involved a lot of trial and error in trying out different options before I hit on improved performance.

Now it turns out that most of the time I was probably trying to prefetch the wrong things. Trying to prefetch linked data structures, which are those that involve pointer chasing (like a linked list),...


Read more at: Hardware Graph Prefetchers

Hardware Graph Prefetchers

3 June 2016

This week sees the publication of two papers from my research group at ICS 2016 and so, in this post, I’d like to look a little more into one of these schemes: the graph prefetcher that my student, Sam, has developed.

Graph workloads are important in a number of domains, and becoming increasingly so. You only have to look at the numerous social media applications to see examples of graph-based data (e.g. in a network of people, each person is a vertex and the edges represent links to friends). But graph representations are also significant in less publicly-visible application areas, such as those in scientific computing or “big data” analytics. However, efficient processing of graph workloads is often...