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AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsSteven T. Comfort, Clifford O. Hayden, John S. Liptay, Susan B. Stillman, Charles F. Webb
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An instruction processing system and method which utilizes instruction completion to isolate errors, including those in the post-completion processing of operand stores, to an interval between checkpoints, while allowing the processing of checkpointing instructions to be overlapped with that of other instructions. Checkpoints are established before and after such instructions, and all processing (including that of operand stores) from before a checkpoint must be done prior to allowing instruction completion to move beyond the checkpoint. Nevertheless, instructions from beyond a checkpoint are allowed to be processed up to the point of completion while waiting for the checkpoint to be cleared. The point at which instructions must wait on a prior checkpoint is thus moved to the final phase of instruction processing (instruction completion), at significant performance advantage over a conventional implementation in which this waiting is done at instruction fetch, decode, or execution time.
In a system that processes instructions, including checkpoint instructions that establish checkpoint synchronization points where failures that occur before checkpoint synchronization points may not be reported after the checkpoint synchronization points, a method to process checkpoint instructions that allows certain instructions subsequent to a checkpoint instruction to be executed concurrently with the execution of said checkpoint instruction, comprising the steps of:
In a system that processes instructions, including checkpoint instructions that establish checkpoint synchronization points where failures that occur before checkpoint synchronization points may not be reported after the checkpoint synchronization points, a method to process checkpoint instructions that allows certain instructions subsequent to a checkpoint instruction to be executed concurrently with the execution of said checkpoint instruction, comprising the steps of:
A method to process checkpoint instructions that allows certain instructions subsequent to a checkpoint instruction to be executed concurrently with execution of said checkpoint instruction in a system that processes instructions, including checkpoint instructions that establish checkpoint synchronization points where failures that occur before said checkpoint synchronization points may not be reported after the checkpoint synchronization points, said method comprising the steps of:
A method to process checkpoint instructions that allows certain instructions subsequent to a checkpoint instruction to be executed concurrently with execution of said checkpoint instruction in a system that processes instructions, including checkpoint instructions that establish checkpoint synchronization points where failures that occur before said checkpoint synchronization points may not be reported after the checkpoint synchronization points, said method comprising the steps of:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.