Performance Debugging Support for Many-Core Processors

众核处理器的性能调试支持

• 批准号: 0903470
• 负责人: Milos Prvulovic
• 金额: $ 13.73万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-08-01 至 2012-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0903470&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Performance; Debugging; Support; Many; Core

Microprocessor performance has doubled approximately every 18 months for several decades, making existing applications faster without much programming effort and allowing more demanding new applications to be developed. However, now the trend of steadily improving performance for existing applications has stalled. The performance potential of a microprocessor chip is still rapidly increasing, but the increase now mainly comes from packing more and more processor cores onto the chip, not from making each core faster. This provides little benefit to existing applications that can only utilize one core, so they must be re-designed to take advantage of multiple cores. Unfortunately, correct design of multi-core applications is much harder to achieve than was the case for single-core applications, and it is even harder for programmers to achieve scalability ? enabling applications to keep improving their performance as even more cores become available in the future. This problem threatens to disrupt the entire hardware-software ecosystem and possibly put an end to rapid improvements in computing performance, the information technology revolution, and the resulting productivity increases.This research project will investigate hardware and software performance debugging mechanisms that would help programmers identify and alleviate performance problems in their many-core applications, both for use in application development and in education. This will help the information technology revolution stay on track by helping existing programmers and training new ones to write scalable many-core applications that will in turn create demand for even more cores, allowing rapid progress in computing performance to continue.

几十年来，微处理器的性能大约每18个月翻一番，使现有的应用程序更快，而无需太多的编程工作，并允许开发要求更高的新应用程序。然而，现在稳步提高现有应用程序性能的趋势已经停滞。微处理器芯片的性能潜力仍在快速增长，但现在的增长主要来自于将越来越多的处理器内核封装到芯片上，而不是使每个内核更快。这对只能利用一个内核的现有应用程序几乎没有好处，因此必须重新设计它们以利用多个内核。不幸的是，多核应用程序的正确设计比单核应用程序更难实现，程序员更难实现可伸缩性。使应用程序能够不断提高其性能，因为将来会有更多的内核可用。这个问题可能会破坏整个硬件-软件生态系统，并可能终止计算性能的快速改进，信息技术革命，以及由此产生的生产力的提高。本研究项目将研究硬件和软件性能调试机制，以帮助程序员识别和减轻他们的众核应用程序的性能问题，无论是在应用程序开发和教育中使用。这将帮助现有程序员和培训新程序员编写可扩展的众核应用程序，从而创造对更多内核的需求，从而使计算性能的快速进步得以继续，从而帮助信息技术革命保持在正轨上。