CSR: Small: Codesign of Accelerator Interface Software and Hardware

CSR：小型：加速器接口软件和硬件的协同设计

• 批准号: 1117280
• 负责人: David Wood
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-15 至 2014-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1117280&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Small; Codesign; Accelerator; Interface

Frequent doubling of computer system performance has facilitated innovations in science, education, government, and commerce. The foundations of these improvements, Moore's Law improving density and Dennard scaling reducing transistor power, have enabled chips with exponentially more transistors at roughly fixed power and cost. However, upcoming physical limits threaten to force a choice between either chip power and cost escalation or stagnant chip performance where lowest cost wins.This project seeks a new middle approach, called dark silicon, that keeps the number of powered-on transistors roughly constant even as the number of transistors per chip grows. Rather than add general-purpose cores, future mainstream chips will deploy many accelerators to improve performance or power by 10x-100x. Such chips will turn on one or more accelerators when needed to help power and/or performance and leave most others off. Accelerators for system-on-chip (SoC) have already been designed, for such uses as encryption, (de)compression, network protocols, XML, and graphics. This research seeks to invent and refine architecture and system support to make existing and future accelerators possible in mainstream processors. Specific focus is given to low-overhead solutions facilitating fine-grain use that allow accelerators to be used and shared while protecting security and privacy. The project relies on co-design of hardware and software interfaces to accelerators in order to enable direct, low-latency access from user-mode code via coherent shared-memory communication.More efficient access to accelerators enables Moore's law to bring continued performance increases without corresponding increases in power. This can reduce the overall power consumption of computing and reduce greenhouse gas production, as well as provide greater computation power at any scale, whether in a mobile device or a supercomputer. The PIs continue to impact broadly the state-of-the-art of computer systems through students, courses, talks, industrial affiliates, commercial influence, and sharing of infrastructure.

计算机系统性能的频繁翻倍促进了科学、教育、政府和商业方面的创新。这些改进的基础，摩尔定律提高了密度，登纳德缩放降低了晶体管的功率，使芯片在大致固定的功率和成本下具有指数级增长的晶体管。然而，即将到来的物理极限可能会迫使我们在芯片性能和成本上升之间做出选择，或者在成本最低的情况下停滞不前。这个项目寻求一种新的中间方法，称为暗硅，即使每个芯片上的晶体管数量增加，也能保持开机晶体管的数量大致不变。未来的主流芯片将部署许多加速器，而不是添加通用核心，从而将性能或功率提高10 -100倍。这种芯片将在需要时打开一个或多个加速器来帮助供电和/或提高性能，而其他大多数加速器则处于关闭状态。已经为片上系统（SoC）设计了加速器，用于加密、（解）压缩、网络协议、XML和图形等用途。这项研究旨在发明和改进架构和系统支持，使现有和未来的加速器在主流处理器中成为可能。特别关注低开销的解决方案，促进细粒度的使用，在保护安全和隐私的同时允许使用和共享加速器。该项目依赖于加速器的硬件和软件接口的协同设计，以便通过一致的共享内存通信实现用户模式代码的直接、低延迟访问。更有效地使用加速器使摩尔定律能够在不相应增加功率的情况下带来持续的性能提高。这可以降低计算的总体功耗，减少温室气体的产生，并在任何规模（无论是移动设备还是超级计算机）上提供更大的计算能力。pi通过学生、课程、讲座、工业附属机构、商业影响和基础设施共享，继续对计算机系统的最新技术产生广泛影响。