Title: Abstract Analysis of Method-Level Speculation Authors: Clark Verbrugge, Allan Kielstra, Christopher J.F. Pickett Speaker: Clark Verbrugge Abstract: Thread-level Speculation (TLS) is a technique for automatic parallelization that has shown excellent results in hardware simulation studies. Existing studies, however, typically require a full stack of analyses, hardware components, and performance assumptions in order to demonstrate and measure speedup, limiting the ability to vary fundamental choices and making basic design comparisons difficult. Here we approach the problem analytically, abstracting several variations on a general form of TLS (method-level speculation) and using our abstraction to model the performance of TLS on common coding idioms. Our investigation is based on exhaustive exploration, and we are able to show how optimal performance is strongly limited by program structure and core choices in speculation design, irrespective of data dependencies. These results provide new, high-level insight into where and how thread-level speculation can and should be applied in order to produce practical speedup.