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

计算在许多领域和社会生活中实现了巨大的创新，这是由于技术扩展带来的持续的性能、功率和成本改进。不幸的是，两个关键趋势威胁着未来计算机的性能和成本改进。首先，技术扩展岌岌可危，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，然而现有的系统大多是以一刀切的方式设计的，与不同应用的需求无关。为了克服这两个问题，这项研究调查了不同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。所采取的方法是应用程序驱动的方法，旨在无缝集成这三个组件中的异构性。这项研究的主要贡献包括：(1)基于第一原理和应用驱动的核设计的初步研究；(2)基于相变存储器的异构主存储器的新机制；(3)三维光学互连设计中的权衡探索；(4)核、互连和存储器中不同组件之间相互作用的初步探索。提出的研究有可能改变未来多核系统的设计和体系结构，这些系统已经成为整个IT行业和我们日常生活的一部分。它可以克服阻碍高性能和低功率、低成本计算的关键挑战，而低成本计算传统上支持新的应用和发现。启用从根本上高效的异质多核系统可以极大地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，许多想法有望直接转移到行业中。

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.