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都施加了显著的设计限制。新的技术节点提供了显著的尺寸缩小优势，但在功率和工艺可变性领域也带来了重大挑战。这些新的技术节点在研究界常用的可用的一阶模型中引入了担忧。晶体管级和门级模拟器可以提供更高的精度，但在模拟运行真实程序的多核处理器时速度太慢。从根本上说，验证新的以功率为中心的想法受到我们预测未来和模拟大规模效应或相对较少理解的现象的能力的限制。制造原型可以弥补这一差距，但基于原型的体系结构研究需要相当多的复杂基础设施，这使得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，这将极大地降低基于原型研究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.