FSU Department of Computer Science faculty David Whalley and Gang-Ryung Uh have been awarded a new NSF grant for the project “Vectorized Instruction Space (VIS)”. The $1.2M project is a collaborative effort between FSU and a colleague, Soner Onder, from Michigan Technological University with each university receiving $600K.
VIS relies on an executable dynamic single assignment form implemented at the machine-instruction level. VIS converts control dependences to data dependences using a process that has significantly less overhead than traditional predication, and it naturally combines controlled multi-path execution with speculation. With this new paradigm, it will be possible to eliminate a significant fraction of difficult to predict branch instructions, and efficiently unroll loops with unknown iteration counts.
The project involves the development of the foundations of the paradigm both at the microarchitecture and the compiler level, targeting both superscalar and VLIW architectures.