EAGER: Collaborative Research: Heterogeneous Cores, Memory-Hierarchy and Communication Architectures for Future CMPs

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Computing has enabled immense innovations in many fields and sociallife due to continued performance, power, and cost improvementsenabled by technology scaling. Unfortunately, two key trends threatenperformance and cost improvement of computers going into thefuture. First, technology scaling is at jeopardy, leading to majorchallenges in power consumption, reliability, and performance. Second,power and energy consumption has become a key constraint, yet existingsystems are mostly designed in a one-size-fits-all way agnostic to theneeds of different applications. To overcome both problems, thisresearch investigates novel uses of heterogeneous technologies inthree key components of a computing system: cores, interconnect, andmemory. The approach taken is an application-driven approach that aimsto seamlessly integrate heterogeneity in the three components. Majorexpected contributions of the research include: (1) an initial studyof first-principles based and application-driven design of cores, (2)new mechanisms for enabling phase-change memory based heterogeneousmain memory, (3) exploration of tradeoffs in the design of3-dimensional optical interconnects, (4) initial exploration of theinteraction of heterogeneous components in cores, interconnect, andmemory.The proposed research has the potential to transform the design andarchitecture of future multi-core systems, which are already a part ofthe entire IT sector and our daily lives. It can enable overcoming keychallenges that impediment higher-performance and lower-powerlower-cost computing, which has traditionally enabled new applicationsand discoveries. Enabling fundamentally efficient heterogeneousmulti-core systems can largely reduce energy and technology-scalingcosts of computing, and improve dependability and performance. Directtransfer of many ideas to industry are expected through extensivecollaborations with platform and chip design industries.