El grup de recerca ALBCOM uneix 19 reconeguts recercaires en Mètodes Formals; Disseny, Automatització i Verificació de VLSI; Algorismes i Complexitat; Bioinformàtica (veure http://albcom.cs.upc.edu/ per més detalls). La recerca que es realitza a ALBCOM té un important prestigi en la comunitat científica internacional, degut a la qualitat de la seva recerca, com mostren les seves publicacions, i a l'activitat en projectes de recerca i de transferència de tecnologia amb empreses i institucions del sector.
The execution of branch instructions causes a loss of performance on pipelined processors. In the paper a new branch mechanism based on a branch target buffer is presented. It executes branches with zero time cost. In order to evaluate its performance improvement for several pipeline structures, an analytical model has been developed and simulations have been performed. The chip area required for its implementation is also considered. The performance increase and the simplicity of its design make it suitable to be included in a RISC-like processor
Cortadella, J.; Jové, T. Microprocessing and microprogramming Vol. 24, num. 1-5, p. 573-580 DOI: 10.1016/0165-6074(88)90113-5 Data de publicació: 1988-08 Article en revista
The execution of branch instructions causes a loss of performance on pipelined processors. In this paper a new branch mechanism based on a Branch Target Buffer is presented. It executes branches with zero time cost. In order to evaluate its performance improvement for several pipeline structures, an analytical model has been developed and simulations have been performed. The chip area required for its implementation is also considered. The performance increase and the simplicity of its design make it suitable to be included in a RISC-like processor.
Gonzalez, A.; Llaberia, J.; Cortadella, J. Microprocessing and microprogramming Vol. 24, num. 1-5, p. 565-572 DOI: 10.1016/0165-6074(88)90112-3 Data de publicació: 1988-08 Article en revista
Execution of branch instructions is one of the main factors that prevents RISC processors from achieving their peak execution rate. A mechanism that attempts to execute branches with zero time cost is proposed. An analytical model that explains the behavior of the mechanism is presented. Simulation results show a significant performance improvement when compared with other schemes widely used in RISC architectures.
Cortadella, J.; Llaberia, J. IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems p. 243-246 DOI: 10.1109/ISCAS.1988.14912 Data de presentació: 1988-06-07 Presentació treball a congrés
The authors consider a type of condition that can be evaluated without requiring a complete ALU (arithmetic logic unit) operation. The circuit that is presented detects the condition A+B=K (n-bit numbers) in constant time, avoiding the carry propagation delay. This circuit can be used to detect a wide spectrum of conditions in branch instructions. It can improve the processor performance by advancing the evaluation of conditions and eliminating the pipeline delays produced by these operations.
Domingo, J.; Llaberia, J.; Valero, M.; Cortadella, J. International Conference on Supercomputing p. 240-248 Data de presentació: 1988-05 Presentació treball a congrés
Presents some arbitration techniques to improve the performance of buffered multistage interconnection networks. In order to evaluate the performance they consider two parameters: throughput and mean service time. A study of the behavior of the network, focused in the average and the instantaneous length in the queues of the switching elements, shows that unbalanced load situations are frequent. One switching element has unbalanced load when one queue is almost full while the other is almost empty. The authors propose two decentralized arbitration mechanisms, respectively named lookahead arbitration and demand driven arbitration. Both arbitration methods try to modify the distribution of the packets in the network, so that unbalanced situations may be avoided or quickly eliminated when they occur. The evaluation is carried out through simulations. Results show that a network using these arbitration mechanisms can provide a better throughput than usual interconnection networks, and also show that the mean service time can be reduced.
Gonzalez, A.; Llaberia, J.; Cortadella, J. Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming p. 565-572 DOI: 10.1016/0165-6074(88)90112-3 Data de presentació: 1988 Presentació treball a congrés
Execution of branch instructions is one of the main factors that prevents RISC processors from achieving their peak execution rate. A mechanism that attempts to execute branches with zero time cost is proposed. An analytical model that explains the behavior of the mechanism is presented. Simulation results show a significant performance improvement when compared with other schemes widely used in RISC architectures.
Gonzalez, A.; Llaberia, J.; Cortadella, J. IASTED International Symposium on Applied Informatics p. 24-27 Data de presentació: 1988 Presentació treball a congrés
Execution of branch instructions is one of the main factors that reduce the performance of pipelines processors. A mechanism that attempts to execute branches with zero time cost is presented. The simulation results show that a 16-31% performance improvement is achieved when compared with other schemes widely used in RISC architectures.
Cortadella, J.; Gonzalez, A.; Llaberia, J. Mundo electrónico. Edición internacional Vol. 1, num. 180, p. 49-57 Data de publicació: 1988-01 Article en revista