IT/SY(CISE): Designing Microprocessors and Computer Systems for Emerging Workloads

万维网的惊人增长导致了一些与计算机应用相关的新信息技术的出现和普及。新兴的计算机工作负载涉及各种软件、协议和标准的集成：图形用户界面、Java、CORBA、CGI、Perl、TCP/IP、HTTP和HTML只是其中的一小部分。为使互联网顺畅地应用于新兴应用，需要设计高效的计算机系统和微处理器，供服务于这些应用的计算机使用。这些工作负载中的大多数才刚刚出现，计算机设计师和架构师还不能很好地理解它们的行为。许多运行这些应用程序的微处理器是在这些工作负载出现之前设计的。拟议的研究包括了解信息技术时代正在出现的工作负载，并为其高效执行设计微处理器和计算机系统。它涉及到在执行这些工作负载期间确定周期的去向，并确定性能损失的来源。这项研究将找出瓶颈，并确定架构增强以提高性能。商用处理器上的性能监控计数器将用于第一级表征，然后是详细的完整系统仿真，用于分析设计权衡。拟议的研究将与我们的工业合作伙伴IBM、Tivoli、Intel和AMD密切合作进行。该项目将作为一个长期、全面的研究计划的组成部分，以影响信息技术时代微处理器和计算机系统的设计。

The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in the emergenceand popularity of several new information technology related computerapplications. The emerging computer workloads involve the integrationof a variety of software, protocols, and standards: GUIs, Java, CORBA, cgi, perl, TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML are just a few of them. Facilitatingsmooth use of the internet for emerging applications involves designingefficient computer systems and microprocessors for use in the computersthat serve these applications. Most of these workloads are just emerging,and their behavior is not well-understood by computer designers andarchitects. Many of the microprocessors that run these applications weredesigned before the advent of these workloads.The proposed research consists of understanding emerging workloads of theInformation Technology era and designing microprocessors and computersystems for their efficient execution. It involves identifying where thecycles are gone during execution of these workloads, and identifyingsources of loss of performance. The study will pin point bottlenecks, andidentify architectural enhancements to improve performance. Theperformance monitoring counters present on commercial processors will beused for the first level of characterization followed by detailed completesystem simulations for analyzing design tradeoffs. The proposed researchwill be conducted in close collaboration with our industrial partners,IBM, Tivoli, Intel and AMD. The project will serve as an integral part ofa long term, comprehensive research program to influence the design ofmicroprocessors and computer systems for the information technology era.