CAREER: Flexible Architectures for Data-Intensive Computing

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This research focuses on data-intensive computing---embedding processing capability in the memory and I/O subsystems of traditional computer systems and shipping the code to the data rather than moving the data through the main microprocessor. Novel architectures that can exploit this newfound flexibility in the memory and I/O system have the potential to significantly improve performance and robustness. They will also remove three important limitations in current parallel and uniprocessor architectures: hardwired cache coherence protocols in scalable multiprocessors, poor cache performance for applications with bad stride accesses or poor spatial locality, and latency and bandwidth bottlenecks in I/O-intensive applications. This research specifically addresses those limitations and includes the development of novel coherence protocols and fairness mechanisms for programmable memory systems; and the development of the necessary protocol extensions to convert the FLASH multiprocessor into an active memory machine. This will be done by exploiting the existence of a hardware prototype to run real-world problems and gain insight into the potential of flexible memory and I/O systems. Finally, the design of Active Fabric, a high performance novel unified architecture for data-intensive computing will be accomplished.