Tasmania Project Overview 

Tasmania is exploring the impact of multithreaded architectures, including multiprocessors, on program performance.  Our first step in this direction extended hardware-level critical path analysis from single-threaded uniprocessors to multithreaded systems.  By exploring the critical path, we can better understand how inter-thread communication impacts system performance.  In particular, we observed a significant amount of spinning, in which threads executed instructions that did not contribute to the critical path.   Spinning arises when a thread must wait to communicate with another thread.  Since spinning is a unique characteristic of multithreaded architectures, we have adopted a famous "spinner", the Tasmanian Devil, as the namesake of this project.