Hardware acceleration wait time awareness in central processing units with multi-thread architectures
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsRui Hou, Yi Ge, Kun Wang, Zhen Bo Zhu
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Provided is a hardware accelerator, central processing unit, and computing device. A hardware accelerator includes a task accelerating unit configured to, in response to a request for a new task issued by a hardware thread, accelerate the processing of the new task and produce a processing result for the task; a task time prediction unit configured to predict the total waiting time of the new task for returning to a specified address associated with the hardware thread. One aspect of this disclosure makes the hardware thread aware of the time to be waited for before getting a processing result, facilitating its task planning accordingly.
Claims18
A hardware accelerator, comprising:
- a task accelerating unit configured to, in response to a request for a new task issued by a hardware thread, accelerate processing of the new task and produce a processing result for the task;
- and
- a task time prediction unit configured to predict total waiting time of the new task for returning to a specified address associated with the hardware thread based upon a sum of time required by the hardware accelerator to complete execution of the new task itself and time required by the hardware accelerator to complete those tasks that have not been completed therein when the new task is received;
- and
- wherein the request issued to the hardware accelerator from the hardware thread comprises an address of an inner register of the hardware thread for specifying the specified address associated with the hardware thread to which the total waiting time of the new task will be returned by the hardware accelerator.
A central processing unit, comprising:
- a hardware thread;
- a task accelerating unit configured to, in response to a request for a new task issued by the hardware thread, accelerate processing of the new task and produce a processing result for the task, the task accelerating unit configured to offload and execute the new task to a hardware accelerator, the hardware accelerator shared by multiple hardware threads, the hardware accelerator including a processing speed higher than that of the hardware threads;
- and
- a task time prediction unit configured to predict total waiting time of the new task for returning to a specified address associated with the hardware thread based upon a sum of time required by the hardware accelerator to complete execution of the new task itself and time required by the hardware accelerator to complete those tasks that have not been completed therein when the new task is received;
- and
- wherein the request issued to the hardware accelerator from the hardware thread comprises an address of an inner register of the hardware thread for specifying the specified address associated with the hardware thread to which the total waiting time of the new task will be returned by the hardware accelerator.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.