research-article

Operating system support for application-specific speculation

Authors:

Benjamin Wester,

Jason FlinnAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '11: Proceedings of the sixth conference on Computer systems

Pages 229 - 242

https://doi.org/10.1145/1966445.1966467

Published: 10 April 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Speculative execution is a technique that allows serial tasks to execute in parallel. An implementation of speculative execution can be divided into two parts: (1) a policy that specifies what operations and values to predict, what actions to allow during speculation, and how to compare results; and (2) the mechanisms that support speculative execution, such as checkpointing, rollback, causality tracking, and output buffering.

In this paper, we show how to separate policy from mechanism. We implement a speculation mechanism in the operating system, where it can coordinate speculations across all applications and kernel state. Policy decisions are delegated to applications, which have the most semantic information available to direct speculation.

We demonstrate how custom policies can be used in existing applications to add new features that would otherwise be difficult to implement. Using custom policies in our separated speculation system, we can hide 85% of program load time by predicting the program's launch, decrease SSL connection latency by 15% in Firefox, and increase a BFT client's request rate by 82%. Despite the complexity of the applications, small modifications can implement these features since they only specify policy choices and rely on the system to realize those policies. We provide this increased programmability with a modest performance trade-off, executing only 8% slower than an optimized, application-implemented speculation system.

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Yan XJoa AWong BCassell BSzepesi TNaouach MLam DPierre GFerreira PShrira L(2018)SpecRPCProceedings of the 19th International Middleware Conference10.1145/3274808.3274829(266-278)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274808.3274829
Liu LZhong RZhang WLiu YZhang JZhang LGruteser M(2018)Cutting the CordProceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/3210240.3210313(68-80)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3210240.3210313
Guerraoui RPavlovic MSeredinschi DKeeton KRoscoe T(2016)Incremental consistency guarantees for replicated objectsProceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3026877.3026891(169-184)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3026877.3026891
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Index Terms

Operating system support for application-specific speculation
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Performance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
    2. Extra-functional properties
      1. Software performance

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cover image ACM Conferences

EuroSys '11: Proceedings of the sixth conference on Computer systems

April 2011

370 pages

ISBN:9781450306348

DOI:10.1145/1966445

General Chair:
Christoph Kirsch
University of Salzburg, Austria
,
Program Chair:
Gernot Heiser
University of New South Wales, Australia

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 10 April 2011

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EuroSys '11

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EuroSys '11: Sixth EuroSys Conference 2011

April 10 - 13, 2011

Salzburg, Austria

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EuroSys '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 161 submissions, 15%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

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Twentieth European Conference on Computer Systems

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Cited By

Yan XJoa AWong BCassell BSzepesi TNaouach MLam DPierre GFerreira PShrira L(2018)SpecRPCProceedings of the 19th International Middleware Conference10.1145/3274808.3274829(266-278)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274808.3274829
Liu LZhong RZhang WLiu YZhang JZhang LGruteser M(2018)Cutting the CordProceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/3210240.3210313(68-80)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3210240.3210313
Guerraoui RPavlovic MSeredinschi DKeeton KRoscoe T(2016)Incremental consistency guarantees for replicated objectsProceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3026877.3026891(169-184)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3026877.3026891
Seshadri VPekhimenko GRuwase OMutlu OGibbons PKozuch MMowry TChilimbi T(2015)Page overlaysACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/2872887.275037943:3S(79-91)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2015
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Seshadri VPekhimenko GRuwase OMutlu OGibbons PKozuch MMowry TChilimbi TMarr DAlbonesi D(2015)Page overlaysProceedings of the 42nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1145/2749469.2750379(79-91)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2749469.2750379
Lee KChu DCuervo EKopf JDegtyarev YGrizan SWolman AFlinn JBorriello GPau GGruteser MHong J(2015)OutatimeProceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/2742647.2742656(151-165)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2742647.2742656
Seshadri VKim YFallin CLee DAusavarungnirun RPekhimenko GLuo YMutlu OGibbons PKozuch MMowry TFarrens MKozyrakis C(2013)RowCloneProceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/2540708.2540725(185-197)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2013
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Antonacci FPellegrini AQuaglia FLoper MWainer G(2013)Consistent and efficient output-streams management in optimistic simulation platformsProceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/2486092.2486133(315-326)Online publication date: 19-May-2013
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Zhang YChen ZWang J(2012)S2PFACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/2382756.238279237:6(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2382756.2382792
Zhang YChen ZWang J(2012)Speculative Symbolic ExecutionProceedings of the 2012 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering10.1109/ISSRE.2012.8(101-110)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ISSRE.2012.8

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