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

由于技术扩展带来的性能、功率和成本的持续改进，计算在许多领域和社会生活中实现了巨大的创新。不幸的是，未来有两大趋势威胁着计算机的性能和成本的提高。首先，技术扩展受到威胁，导致在功耗、可靠性和性能方面面临重大挑战。其次，功率和能源消耗已经成为一个关键的制约因素，但现有的系统大多设计成一刀切的方式，无法满足不同应用的需求。为了克服这两个问题，本研究调查了异构技术在计算系统的三个关键组件中的新用途：核心，互连和内存。所采用的方法是一种应用程序驱动的方法，旨在无缝地集成三个组件中的异构性。该研究的主要预期贡献包括：(1)基于第一性原理和应用驱动的核心设计的初步研究，(2)基于相变存储器的异构主存储器的新机制，(3)探索三维光互连设计中的权衡，(4)初步探索核心，互连和存储器中异构组件的相互作用。拟议的研究有可能改变未来多核系统的设计和架构，这已经是整个IT部门和我们日常生活的一部分。它可以克服阻碍高性能、低功耗、低成本计算的关键挑战，传统上，这些挑战使新应用和新发现成为可能。从根本上实现高效的异构多核系统可以大大降低计算的能源和技术扩展成本，并提高可靠性和性能。通过与平台和芯片设计行业的广泛合作，期望将许多想法直接转移到工业中。

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.