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

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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.