CAREER: Holistic Computer Architectures for Nanoscale Processors

职业：纳米级处理器的整体计算机架构

• 批准号: 0747201
• 负责人: Gokhan Memik
• 金额: $ 32万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-04-01 至 2014-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0747201&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Holistic; Computer; Architectures; Nanoscale

Technology scaling has arguably been the most important contributor to the increase in the computational power in microprocessors and indirectly affects many aspects of modern life. One of the most important challenges facing continued technology scaling is the increasing variability in device characteristics, i.e., process variations. Process variations manifest themselves as fluctuations in performance, power, and reliability of manufactured processors. To mitigate these effects, this CAREER program develops variation-tolerant architectures that utilize ?holistic optimizations?, i.e., this project studies techniques that simultaneously consider various computational abstraction levels. The two intriguing examples of such techniques are the consideration of economical incentives to measure the quality of architectures and optimizing for user-perceived performance to increase lifetime reliability. In addition, this project studies the development of understudy components and modular architectures. Understudy components are structures that can replace parts of the chips that fail, whereas modular architectures are processors built using a small variety of similar structures that can be dynamically allocated. These research tasks have the potential of having a large impact on both academic and industrial research. Process variations cause immense problems to all processor manufacturers and their rising impact should be understood in detail. In addition, there is a growing need to understand how different architectures affect the overall targets of the processor manufacturers as well as the users of these processors. Such an understanding, which will be developed in this project, can then be used to architect much more efficient processors.

技术扩展可以说是微处理器计算能力增加的最重要贡献者，并间接影响现代生活的许多方面。持续的技术缩放所面临的最重要的挑战之一是器件特性的可变性增加，即，工艺变化。工艺变化本身表现为制造的处理器的性能、功率和可靠性的波动。为了减轻这些影响，这个职业生涯计划开发的变化容忍架构，利用？整体优化？也就是说，本项目研究同时考虑各种计算抽象层次的技术。此类技术的两个有趣的例子是考虑经济激励来衡量架构质量，以及优化用户感知的性能以提高寿命可靠性。此外，本项目还研究了备用组件和模块化架构的开发。备用组件是可以替换芯片故障部分的结构，而模块化架构是使用可以动态分配的少量类似结构构建的处理器。 这些研究任务有可能对学术和工业研究产生重大影响。工艺变化给所有处理器制造商带来了巨大的问题，应该详细了解它们不断上升的影响。此外，越来越需要了解不同的架构如何影响处理器制造商以及这些处理器的用户的整体目标。这样的理解，这将在这个项目中开发，然后可以用来架构更有效的处理器。