Posts tagged with Research

Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly interested in dynamic binary modification (DBM) tools, so much so that I supervise a PhD student who is trying to parallelise binaries using one, and am just starting work on a grant that continues and extends this work . On Intel’s architecture, Pin is probably the most famous tool, and one that I had most experience of in the past. (As an aside, Pin is a dynamic binary instrumentation tool, but I’m going to use modification instead of instrumentation throughout this post, since modification subsumes instrumentation and I’m more interested in optimisation than just analysis.) However, it’s closed source and only targets Intel’s ISAs. Another option is ...

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),...

This post is about my group’s second ICS paper from June this year, which describes a new single producer / single consumer (SP/SC) software queue that we developed for frequent inter-core communication. It’s faster than existing implementations and we call it Lynx . It’s available on my group’s data page .

Initially, we didn’t set out to create a new queue. We were experimenting with transient error detection techniques in software. Transient, or soft, errors are faults that occur sporadically within a microprocessor, causing a data value or instruction to change. They are the result of strikes to the chip from cosmic rays (or usually the secondary particles they excite) or alpha particles from...

Today was the annual Wheeler lecture at the Computer Laboratory, and before the main event, a talk by Andrew Herbert, there was a Minute Madness where people from across the Lab, ranging from MPhil students through to professors, talked for one minute about their research with a single slide as a prop. My slide and something approximating the words I used are below.

“Hello! My group works on ways of making applications go faster, through a technique called program parallelisation.

If you look on the left of the slide, the red wavy arrow represents a regular sequential application with a single thread of execution within it. This means that instructions execute one...