MCDA: Efficient Mechanisms for Multicore Processors

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。随着制造商采用多核架构，主流计算--台式机、数据中心和嵌入式设备--正在经历前所未有的并行化转变。传统的多核处理器具有非常低效的通信、同步和位置管理机制，导致它们在解决困难问题时伸缩性差，并且难以编程。该研究建议开发一套高效的机制--硬件API和支持微体系结构--用于通信、同步和位置管理。具体地说，该项目建议开发一种灵活的内存层次结构、基于寄存器的通信和同步以及快速活动消息。通过将通信和同步开销减少数量级，可以显著提高多核处理器的效率、可编程性和可伸缩性。总体而言，这些机制将使程序员从传统多核体系结构施加的附带限制中解放出来，使他们能够专注于并行性、局部性和负载平衡等基本问题。这项拟议的工作预计将对未来多核处理器的体系结构和编程系统产生巨大影响。通过减少通信和同步开销，这些机制将使许多并行度不高的应用程序受益于多核架构。这项工作可能会使新一代多核编程系统成为可能。教育计划包括将这项研究的结果纳入斯坦福大学的研究生和本科生课程。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."Mainstream computing - on the desktop, in the datacenter, and in embedded devices - is undergoing an unprecedented shift toward parallelism as manufacturers adopt multi-core architectures. Conventional multi-core processors have very inefficient communication, synchronization, and locality-management mechanisms causing them to scale poorly on hard problems and to be difficult to program. The research proposes to develop a set of efficient mechanisms - hardware APIs and supporting microarchitecture - for communication, synchronization, and locality management. Specifically, the project proposes to develop an agile memory hierarchy, register-based communication and synchronization, and fast active messages. By reducing communication and synchronization overhead by orders of magnitude, it is possible to substantially improve the efficiency, programmability, and scalability of multi-core processors. Overall, the mechanisms will free programmers from the incidental constraints imposed by conventional multi-core architectures - allowing them to concentrate instead on the fundamental issues of parallelism, locality, and load balance. The proposed work is expected to have an immense impact on future architecture and programming systems for multi-core processors. By reducing communication and synchronization overheads, the mechanisms will enable many applications that are not embarrassingly parallel to benefit from multi-core architectures. The work is likely to enable a new generation of multi-core programming systems. The educational plan includes to integrate the results of this research into graduate and undergraduate courses at Stanford University.