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US 9,003,169 B2Granted
Systems and methods for indirect register access using status-checking and status-setting instructions
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsDavid F. Bacon, Xiaowei Shen
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The present invention broadly contemplates braids and fibers, high-level programming constructs which facilitate the creation of programs that are partially ordered, to address the continuing trend of ever-increasing processor speeds and attendant increases in memory latencies. These partial orders can be used to respond adaptively to memory latencies. It is shown how these constructs can be effectively supported with simple and inexpensive instruction set and micro-architectural extensions.
Claims8
A computer system comprising:
- one or more system-managed registers, each of the one or more system-managed registers having a register state indicating whether the one or more system-managed registers are free or busy;
- software configured to access the one or more system-managed registers only indirectly via a register index, wherein the register index can be obtained by the software only via checking the register state of the one or more system-managed registers;
- a first instruction configured to provide an index of one of the one or more system-managed registers with a free register state;
- and
- a number-providing instruction configured to provide a number indicating how many of the one or more system-managed registers have a busy register state.
2 more elements
A computer-implemented method comprising:
- configuring one or more system-managed registers to have a register state indicating whether the one or more system-managed registers are free or busy;
- providing access, to software, to the one or more system-managed registers only indirectly via a register index, wherein the register index can be obtained by the software only via checking the register state of the one or more system-managed registers;
- configuring a first instruction to provide an index of one of the one or more system-managed registers with a free register state;
- and
- configuring a number-providing instruction to provide a number indicating how many of the one or more system-managed registers have a busy register state.
2 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.