Collaborative Research: II-NEW: Prototyping Platform to Enable Power-Centric Multicore Research

从最小的手持设备到最大的数据中心，功耗在整个计算范围内施加了重大的设计约束。新技术节点提供了显著的尺寸减小优势，但在功率和工艺可变性领域引入了显著的挑战。这些新技术节点在研究界常用的一阶模型中引入了问题。 晶体管级和门级模拟器可以提供更高的精度，但对于运行真实的程序的多核处理器建模来说太慢了。从根本上说，验证以功率为中心的新想法受到我们预测未来和建模大规模效应或相对缺乏理解的现象的能力的限制。 制造原型可以弥合差距，但基于原型的架构研究需要相当数量的复杂基础设施，使学术研究人员相对较少。 该项目提出了一个完整的原型平台，这将大大减少基于原型的研究到以电源为中心的多核架构所需的成本和工作量。

Power consumption imposes significant design constraints across the entire spectrum of computing, from the smallest handheld device to the largest data center. New technology nodes provide significant size reduction advantages, but introduce significant challenges in the power and process variability domain. These new technology nodes introduce concerns in the available first-order models commonly used by the research community. Transistor-level and gate-level simulators can offer higher accuracy, but are too slow to model multicore processors running real programs.Fundamentally, validating novel power-centric ideas is limited by our ability to anticipate the future and to model large-scale effects or relatively poorly understood phenomenon. Fabricating prototypes can bridge the gap, but prototype-based architecture research requires a considerable amount of complex infrastructure making it relatively rare for academic researchers. This projects proposes a complete prototyping platform, that will greatly reduce the cost and effort required for prototype-based research into power-centric multicore architectures.