This page contains a description of the funded projects for which David Whalley is a principal investigator. The publications listed for each project are only those that are directly related to the project's goals.
As mobile embedded systems become more prevalent, there is an increasing demand to make processor pipelines more power efficient. Conventional pipeline inefficiencies include unnecessary accesses to the register file due to duplication or avoidable computation from constantly checking for forwarding and hazards at points where they cannot possibly occur, repeated calculation of invariant values, etc. It is desirable to develop an alternative processor design that can avoid these wasteful energy consumption aspects of a traditionally pipelined processor while still achieving comparable performance. A statically pipelined processor is expected to achieve these goals by having the control during each cycle for each portion of the processor explicitly represented in each instruction. The pipelining is in effect statically determined by the compiler, which has several potential benefits, such as reducing energy consumption without degrading performance, supporting a less complex design with a lower production cost, and being able to apply more effective compiler optimizations due to instructions having more explicit control of the processor. This is a collaborative project with Gary Tyson at Florida State University, sponsored by NSF from 05/10 to 04/14.
Mobile computer systems and software are increasingly subject to a host of security threats and malicious software (malware) attacks due to vulnerabilities in their coding. Traditional approaches have sought to provide an absolute defense to specific malware attacks by patching software vulnerabilities or detecting and blocking malware. The current situation also represents a programmatic arms race between patching existing vulnerabilities and exploiting vulnerabilities in new application code. This research develops a new secure mobile computing environment based on current mobile technology widely available as consumer end products that seeks to use program differentiation to reduce the propagation rate of malware when a software vulnerability exists. This results not in the direct elimination of security vulnerabilities, but in the dramatic reduction in scope of any security exploit to infect large numbers of systems. By constraining the outbreak to only a few systems, counter measures can be employed before significant economic damage can result. By modifying aspects of the execution of the application, application executables can be permuted into unique versions for each distributed instance. Differentiation is achieved using hardware and/or systems software modifications. This is a collaborative project with Gary Tyson at Florida State University, sponsored by NSF from 09/09 to 08/12.
An instruction register file (IRF) can be used to hold the most frequently occurring instructions within an application. The instructions in the IRF can be referenced by a single packed instruction in ROM or a L1 instruction cache (IC). Use of an IRF can decrease code size due to referencing multiple IRF instructions within a packed instruction, reduce energy consumption since a 32 entry IRF requires much less power to access than a L1 IC, and reduce execution time due to a smaller footprint in the IC and the ability to execute instructions during an IC miss. In this project we are evaluating compiler and architectural techniques to address limitations on the number of packed instructions and how an IRF can be used to complement other compiler optimizations and architectural features that save energy and reduce code size. This is a collaborative project with Gary Tyson at Florida State University, sponsored by NSF from 09/06 to 08/09.
Predicting the WCET (worst-case execution time) of tasks is needed for real-time systems. One issue that limits the set of applications whose WCET can be predicted is determing the worst-case number of iterations that each loop will iterate. We are developing a timing analyzer that can predict the WCET of applications where the number of loop iterations is known at run-time. Rather than predicting a constant number of cycles, we will instead produce a WCET formula, which can be quickly evaluated at run-time to support dynamic scheduling decisions. We have also integrated a timing analyzer with a compiler to support the development of compiler optimizations to decrease WCET. This is a collaborative project with Chris Healy at Furman University and Frank Mueller at North Carolina State University, sponsored by NSF from 09/03 to 08/06.
Conditional branches are expensive since they are frequently executed, consume cycles, and can be mispredicted which can cause pipeline stalls. We are investigating how to reduce the number of executed branches by merging branch conditions. This is a collaborative project with Mark Bailey at Hamilton College and Robert van Engelen and Xin Yuan at Florida State University, sponsored by NSF from 09/02 to 08/05.
VISTA (Vpo Interactive System for Tuning Applications) allows embedded application developers to interact with a low-level compiler to tune their code. Features include visualization of the program representation, selecting the order and scope of compiler optimizations, entering code-improving transformations by hand, automatic selection of optimization phase sequences according to specified performance criteria, and undoing of previously applied transformations. This is a collaborative project with Jack Davidson at University of Virginia, Doug Jones at University of Illinois-Champaign, and Kyle Gallivan at Florida State University, sponsored by NSF from 10/00 to 09/05.
Embedded applications are often developed entirely or partially in assembly code. In this project we investigated techniques for validating both manually and automatic code-improving transformations. This was a collaborative project with Robert van Engelen and Xin Yuan at Florida State University, sponsored by NSF from 09/99 to 08/03.
This project involved the development of optimization techniques that can be used on large applications. This was a collaborative project with Rajiv Gupta at University of Arizona, Lori Pollack at University of Delaware, and Mary Lou Soffa at University of Pittsburgh, sponsored by NSF from 10/98 to 09/02.
Predicting the worst-case execution time (WCET) of tasks is required for real-time systems. This project involved the development of a timing analysis techniques that could automatically predict the WCET of programs in the presence of modern architectural features such as caches and pipelines. This was a collaborative project with Marion Harmon at Florida A&M University, sponsored by ONR from 10/93 to 09/96.