System-level issues for software thread integration: guest triggering and host selection

Software thread integration provides low-cost concurrency on general-purpose processors by automatically interleaving multiple threads of control into one. This simplifies hardware to software migration and can help embedded system designers meet design constraints. Previous work describes how to efficiently integrate threads. In this paper we demonstrate how to link trigger events with guest thread execution and how to analyze an application to determine which threads to integrate. The analysis involves timing measurement and prediction to identify the amount of easily accessible temporally deterministic code within each function. This information is used to predict quantitatively the impact of design decisions on system efficiency and help guide integration. To illustrate this process we evaluate an application predicted for the year 2005, when $20 buys a 2000 MIPS embedded processor-a software-based high-resolution MPEG video player.