SHF: Small: Multi-Core Architecture, Applications, and Tools Co-Design

技术限制、新兴应用和不断变化的可用性趋势正在引领多核计算机系统进入一个新时代。应用程序和微处理器设计的一个关键问题是，应用程序在很大程度上独立于微处理器的体系结构开发而发展。这是体系结构研究的一个问题，因为开发高效的体系结构解决方案需要对下一代应用程序进行现实的表征。从系统设计的角度来看，理解应用程序行为对于构建高效的系统至关重要，因为必须对它们进行优化以利用体系结构中提供的机制。这项建议寻求使用最先进的量化设计工具重新思考下一代多核系统-包括软件和硬件架构。这项研究中探索的两个关键想法如下。首先，是一种混合任务级/数据级并行执行模型，适用于具有丰富但不具有无同步并行性的新兴应用程序。第二，是开发新的高度准确和高效的量化模型，以评估大规模和广泛的应用程序工作负载的架构和应用程序设计备选方案。该项目寻求提供一套量化工具，以结束软件在硬件上的行为的设计、评估和分析的开发循环，允许对软件和硬件进行调整。该项目将实时图形作为一种挑战应用程序，并为未来的实时图形开发了一个完整的系统，称为哥白尼，它可以提供显著更高的图像质量。该项目还将把这些量化模型整合到课程中，并向研究团体传播。这项研究中提出的创新可能会对未来系统的微处理器和应用程序开发产生重大帮助。光线跟踪的完整系统规范的开发可能会引发可编程处理器和专用图形处理器的发展拐点。

Technology limitations, emerging applications, and changing usability trends are ushering in a new era in multi-core computer systems. A key problem for both application and microprocessor design is that applications are largely evolving independently from the architectural development of microprocessors. This is a problem for architectural research because developing efficient architectural solutions requires realistic characterization of the next generation applications. From a system design perspective, understanding application behavior is crucial for building an efficient system, since they must be optimized to exploit mechanisms provided in the architecture. This proposal seeks to re-think next generation multi-core systems - both softwareand hardware architectures using state-of-the-art quantitative designtools.The two key ideas explored in this research are the following. First, is a hybrid task-level/data-level parallelism execution model for emerging applications that have abundant but not synchronization-free parallelism. Second, is the development of new highly accurate and efficient quantitative models to evaluate architecture and application design alternatives, at scale and over a wide range of application workloads. The project seeks to provide a suite of quantitative tools to close the development loop of design, evaluation and analysis of software's behavior on hardware, allowing the tuning of both software and hardware. This project takes real-time graphics as a challenge application and derives a full system, called Copernicus, for future real-time graphics that can provide significantly higher imagequalities. The project will also integrate these quantitative models in the curriculum and disseminate to the research community.The innovations proposed in this research have the potential for significantly aiding microprocessor and application development for future systems. The development of a full system specification for ray-tracing can trigger an inflection in the evolution of both programmable processors andspecialized graphics processors.