A Proposal for Research on VLSI Engines for Lattice Calculations

格子计算 VLSI 引擎研究提案

• 批准号: 8705454
• 负责人: Kenneth Steiglitz
• 金额: $ 16.87万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1987
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1987-09-01 至 1990-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8705454&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Proposal; Research; VLSI; Engines; Lattice

This research deals with the problems of designing and building practical, custom VLSI-based computers for lattice calculations. These computational problems are characterized by being iterative, defined on a regular lattice of points, uniform in space and time, local, and relatively simple. Examples include numerical solution of differential equations, iterative image processing, and cellular automata. The recently invented lattice gas automata, which are microscopic models for fluid dynamics, are a testbed for the work. The machines envisaged--lattice engines--would typically consist of many instances of a custom chip and a general-purpose host machine for support. In many practical situations, the performance of such machines is limited, not by the speed and size of the actual processing elements, but by the communication bandwidth on- and off-chip, and by the memory capacity of the chip. The specific research consists of three phases to be conducted concurrently: (1) performance analysis of existing architectures, (2) extension of current theory to give bounds on achievable throughput rate as a function of chip I/O bandwidth and memory capacity for the particular lattices of interest, and (3) construction and testing of prototype machines. Examples of computational problems amenable to lattice calculations include the numerical solution of differential equations, iterative image processing, and cellular automata. These are all very important problems. The focus of this project on the problems of designing and building practical custom VLSI-based computers aimed specifically at this class of calculations offers the potential of much faster problem solutions than on general-purpose computers.

这项研究涉及设计和构建用于晶格计算的实用、定制的基于 VLSI 的计算机的问题。 这些计算问题的特点是迭代、定义在规则的点格上、空间和时间均匀、局部且相对简单。 示例包括微分方程的数值解、迭代图像处理和元胞自动机。 最近发明的晶格气体自动机是流体动力学的微观模型，是这项工作的测试平台。 设想的机器——晶格引擎——通常由定制芯片的许多实例和用于支持的通用主机组成。 在许多实际情况中，此类机器的性能并非受到实际处理元件的速度和尺寸的限制，而是受到片上和片外的通信带宽以及芯片的存储容量的限制。 具体研究包括同时进行的三个阶段：（1）现有架构的性能分析，（2）现有理论的扩展，以给出可实现的吞吐率的界限，作为感兴趣的特定晶格的芯片I/O带宽和内存容量的函数，以及（3）原型机的构建和测试。 适合晶格计算的计算问题的示例包括微分方程的数值解、迭代图像处理和元胞自动机。 这些都是非常重要的问题。 该项目的重点是设计和构建实用的基于 VLSI 的定制计算机，专门针对此类计算，提供比通用计算机更快的问题解决方案的潜力。