MP-Tomasulo: A Dependency-Aware Automatic Parallel Execution Engine for Sequential Programs

This article presents MP-Tomasulo, a dependency-aware automatic parallel task execution engine for sequential programs. Applying the instruction-level Tomasulo algorithm to MPSoC environments, MP-Tomasulo detects and eliminates Write-After-Write (WAW) and Write-After-Read (WAR) inter-task dependencies in the dataflow execution, therefore to operate out-of-order task execution on heterogeneous units. We implemented the prototype system within a single FPGA. Experimental results on EEMBC applications demonstrate that MP-Tomasulo can execute the tasks out-of-order to achieve as high as 93.6% to 97.6% of ideal peak speedup. A comparative study against a state-of-the-art dataflow execution scheme is illustrated with a classic JPEG application. The promising results show MP-Tomasulo enables programmers to uncover more task-level parallelism on heterogeneous systems, as well as to ease the burden of programmers.