Onur Mutlu and co-authors receive the 2021 HPCA Test of Time Award
Onur Mutlu and co-authors received the HPCA Test of Time Award for their 2003 HPCA paper "Runahead Execution: An Alternative to Very Large Instruction Windows for Out-of-Order Processors”. The IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) Test of Time Award recognizes the most influential papers published in prior sessions of HPCA (held 18-22 years ago), and that have had a significant impact in the field.
The paper was Professor Onur Mutlu’s first publication during his PhD at the University of Texas with his PhD advisor Professor Yale Patt and colleagues from Intel, and Dr. Jared Stark and Chris Wilkerson.
The significance of the paper was described by the award committee as: “Runahead Execution is a pioneering paper that opened up new avenues in dynamic prefetching. The basic idea of run ahead execution effectively increases the instruction window very significantly, without having to increase physical resource size (e.g. the issue queue). This seminal paper spawned off a new area of ILP-enhancing microarchitecture research. This work has had strong industry impact as evidenced by IBM’s POWER6 – Load Lookahead, NVIDIA Denver, and Sun ROCK’s hardware scouting.”
The award was presented at HPCA 2021 on March 2, 2021.
More information: Website of the Safari group