CISE Research Instrumentation: Configurable off-the-shelf Multithreaded Experimental Testbed (COMET)

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EIA-9986043Guang R. GaoUniversity of DelawareCISE Research Instrumentation: CONFIGURABLE OFF-THE SHELF MULTITHREADED EXPERIMENTAL TESTBED (COMET)The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware will purchase FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) design boards, a Beowulf cluster of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) PC's and necessary accessories such as an oscilloscope. The FPGA units will form the Multithreaded Operator for Of-the shelf Nodes (MOON), which will be used for prototyping multithreading enhancements to COTS-based machines. The PC cluster will provide a baseline for comparing the performance of enhanced and non-enhanced clusters. The combination of the MOON cards and the cluster will form COMET. The test equipment will permit the development of a custom interconnect between the MOON board, and will be used for observing and debugging high-speed signals.This equipment will be used to test the thesis, supported by previous simulations, that a fine-grain multithreading model supporting both regular and irregular applications can be implemented on COTS systems if a small amount of custom hardware is used to support the operations specific to the multithreading model. The Moon would provide a flexible and multi-faceted prototyping system for verifying these results in real system, and for supporting other, more advanced multithreading models, which are specific to ongoing research projects.