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

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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.