Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Instruction-level parallelism
Summary
Instruction-level parallelism (ILP) is the parallel or simultaneous execution of a sequence of instructions in a computer program. More specifically ILP refers to the average number of instructions run per step of this parallel execution.
ILP must not be confused with concurrency. In ILP there is a single specific thread of execution of a process. On the other hand, concurrency involves the assignment of multiple threads to a CPU's core in a strict alternation, or in true parallelism if there are enough CPU cores, ideally one core for each runnable thread.
There are two approaches to instruction-level parallelism: hardware and software.
Hardware level works upon dynamic parallelism, whereas the software level works on static parallelism. Dynamic parallelism means the processor decides at run time which instructions to execute in parallel, whereas static parallelism means the compiler decides which instructions to execute in parallel. The Pentium processor works on the dynamic sequence of parallel execution, but the Itanium processor works on the static level parallelism.
Consider the following program:
e = a + b
f = c + d
m = e * f
Operation 3 depends on the results of operations 1 and 2, so it cannot be calculated until both of them are completed. However, operations 1 and 2 do not depend on any other operation, so they can be calculated simultaneously. If we assume that each operation can be completed in one unit of time then these three instructions can be completed in a total of two units of time, giving an ILP of 3/2.
A goal of compiler and processor designers is to identify and take advantage of as much ILP as possible. Ordinary programs are typically written under a sequential execution model where instructions execute one after the other and in the order specified by the programmer. ILP allows the compiler and the processor to overlap the execution of multiple instructions or even to change the order in which instructions are executed.
How much ILP exists in programs is very application specific.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.