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

CSR：小：加速迈向硬件专业化时代：整体方法

• 批准号: 1218432
• 负责人: Karthikeyan Sankaralingam
• 金额: $ 38.75万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1218432&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Small; Accelerating; Towards; Hardware

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.

由于基本的功率限制，晶体管的能源效率没有改善，因此使计算机芯片功率有限。没有建造微处理器硬件的大量创新，我们已经习惯的绩效改进将无法持续。使用加速器的专业化并从而降低了功率，这是一个有希望的前进方法，这是Simd-Accelerator和GPU的商业成功以及新的计算机硬件研究概念所证明的。显然，在此设计空间中，加速器的设计空间非常多，从它们针对的工作的粒度，基线处理器，它们加速的基线处理器，编译和执行模型以及提交给应用程序开发人员的抽象。这种广泛的选择引入了一个基本问题，因为对于这个广泛的设计空间，工具和应用程序框架不存在。该项目的超大目标是开发涵盖加速器设计空间的定量工具，机制和详细的应用研究。该项目为专业时代提供了一系列技术：一个新型的框架，以指导微处理器设计和应用程序开发人员，以推理有关加速器，建筑机制以及高度优化加速器的高级应用程序的推理。这些工具和机制有助于维持未来电力限制的技术一代的性能改善。 项目的原型系统，仿真增强功能和编译器框架作为社区的工具发布。该项目对计算物理应用程序的关注有许多用途，可以通过实现从虚拟手术到建模雪地上的车辆遍历的应用，从而对社会的广泛影响产生积极影响。 PI继续指导代表性不足的学生和本科生，作为该项目的一部分。