Achieving reliable system performance by fast recovery of branch miss prediction

作者：Choi Min; Park Jong Hyuk; Lim Seungho; Jeong Young Sik^*

来源：Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2012, 35(3): 982-991.

DOI：10.1016/j.jnca.2011.03.015

• System reliability
• Fault-tolerant system
• Branch misprediction recovery

Today%26apos;s technology evolution provides users inexpensive and powerful computer systems. However, there are argues that system reliability and fault tolerance is necessary in the systems as well. A proper design for the reliable and fault-tolerant computer system requires a trade-off among cost, reliability, and availability. In this paper, we propose a low-cost recovery scheme for reliable system performance. With this approach, it completely eliminates the roll-back overhead on branch misprediction. Thus, the instruction fetcher does not stop and it fetches instructions from the correct path immediately after the misprediction detected. So, this approach prevents a processor from flushing the pipeline, even under branch misprediction by allowing the instruction fetcher to work continuously. Our approach reduces the branch misprediction penalty for achieving reliable system performance. It instantly reconstructs the map table to any mispredicted branch and it outperforms the conventional RMT by an average of 10.93%.

• 出版日期2012-5