CSR: Small: Accelerating Towards the Hardware Specialization Era: A Holistic Approach

由于基本的功率限制，晶体管的能量效率没有提高，从而使计算机芯片的功率受到限制。如果在构建微处理器硬件的方式上没有重大的创新，我们已经习惯的性能改进将无法持续。使用加速器的专门化，从而降低功耗，是一条很有前途的前进道路，simd加速器和gpu的商业成功以及新的计算机硬件研究概念都证明了这一点。显然，在这个加速器的设计空间中有很多选择，从它们目标工作的粒度、它们加速的基准处理器、编译和执行模型，以及呈现给应用程序开发人员的抽象。这种广泛的选择带来了一个基本问题，即没有工具和应用程序框架来推理这种广泛的设计空间。该项目的总体目标是开发涵盖加速器设计空间的定量工具、机制和详细应用研究。该项目为专业化时代提供了一系列技术：一个指导微处理器设计和应用程序开发人员对加速器、体系结构机制和加速器高度优化应用程序进行推理的新框架。这些工具和机制有助于在未来功率受限的技术世代中保持性能改进。该项目的原型系统、仿真增强和编译器框架作为社区工具发布。该项目专注于计算物理应用，通过实现从虚拟手术到雪地地形车辆穿越建模等应用，对社会产生了广泛的积极影响。作为该项目的一部分，pi继续指导代表性不足的学生和本科生。

Due to fundamental power limitations, the energy efficiency of transistors is not improving, thus making computer chips power limited. Without significant innovations in the ways to build microprocessor hardware, the performance improvements that we have grown accustomed to cannot be sustained. Specialization using accelerators, and thereby reducing power, is a promising way forward, as evidenced by the commercial success of SIMD-accelerators and GPUs, and by new computer hardware research concepts. Clearly there are very many choices in this design space of accelerators, ranging from the granularity of the work they target, the baseline processor they accelerate, compilation and execution model, and abstraction presented to the application developer. This wide choice introduces a fundamental problem in that tools and application frameworks do not exist for reasoning about this wide design space. This project's over-arching goal is to develop quantitative tools, mechanisms, and detailed application studies covering the design space of accelerators.The project provides an array of techniques for the specialization era: a novel framework to guide microprocessor designs and application developers to reason about accelerators, architecture mechanisms, and highly optimized applications for accelerators. The tools and mechanisms help sustain performance improvements in future power-constrained technology generations. The project's prototype system, simulation enhancements, and compiler framework are released as tools for the community. The project's focus on computational-physics applications has numerous uses that positively impact broad swaths of society by enabling applications ranging from virtual surgery to modeling vehicle traversal on snow terrains. The PIs continue mentoring under-represented students and undergraduate students as part of this project.