Architectures for Emerging Applications

本研究的主要目标是为新兴和未来的媒体处理应用开发和评估通用架构。预计这些应用程序需要的性能要比目前的通用系统高几个数量级。一个关键的挑战是设计能够在不牺牲传统应用程序性能的情况下为媒体应用程序提供这种性能改进的系统。这项研究利用了一个独特的机会，将致力于媒体处理底层技术的架构研究人员和应用研究人员聚集在一起。主要研究三类应用：(1)信号处理；具体来说，视频、图像、音频、语音处理和高速调制解调器，(2)无线通信，以及(3)虚拟环境和可视化。方法是使用模拟来开发对这些应用程序行为的定量理解，并使用这种理解来开发新的体系结构技术。对图像和视频应用程序的初步定量研究激发了两个架构方向：(I)设计可动态分区的缓存，以及（II）为通用系统的专用媒体功能使用可重构逻辑。在过去，由于缺乏对应用程序的访问，这种体系结构研究一直受到阻碍。与工业界和其他研究人员的拟议合作将克服这一障碍，并使基于未来应用的未来架构设计成为可能。

The broad objective of this research is to develop and evaluate general-purpose architectures for emerging and future media-processing applications. These applications are expected to require orders-of-magnitude higher performance than available on today's general-purpose systems. A key challenge is to design systems that will provide such performance improvements for media applications, without sacrificing performance for more conventional applications.This research avails of a unique opportunity to bring together architecture researchers and applications researchers working on the technologies underlying media processing. The research focuses on three classes of applications: (1) signal processing; specifically, video, image, audio, speech processing, and high-speed modems, (2) wireless communication, and (3) virtual environments and visualization. The approach is to use simulation to develop a quantitative understanding of the behavior of these applications, and use this understanding to develop new architectural techniques. An initial quantitative study of image and video applications has motivated two architectural directions: (I) design of dynamically partitionable caches, and (II) use of reconfigurable logic for specialized media functions for a general-purpose system.In the past, such architectural research has been impeded by a lack of access to applications. The proposed collaboration with industry and other researchers will overcome this impediment and enable the design of future architectures based on future applications.