This document describes the progress we have made and the lessons we have learned in 1999 under the NASA Grant NAG2-1230 entitled "Application-Specific Supercomputing". The long-term goal of this research is to accelerate large, irregular scientific applications which have enormous data sets and which are difficult to parallelize. To accomplish this goal, we are exploring two complementary techniques: (i) using compiler-inserted prefetching to automatically hide the I/O latency of accessing these large data sets from disk; and (ii) using thread-level data speculation to enable the optimistic parallelization of applications despite uncertainty as to whether data dependences exist between the resulting threads which would normally make them unsafe to execute in parallel. Overall, we made significant progress in 1999, and the project is going well.

31 pages

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