XPS: DSD: Polymorphic Hardware Specialization for Domain-Specific Algorithms and Data Structures

严重的物理设计问题正在打破计算机系统的传统抽象，并促使计算机架构师转向硬件专业化。与可以处理许多不同任务的灵活硬件实现相比，专用于单个任务的硬件在硅面积和能耗方面几乎总是具有更高的性能和效率。解决效率较低的通用体系结构和效率较高的专用体系结构之间的紧张关系，特别是在主流计算平台的上下文中，是计算机体系结构社区面临的重大挑战之一。该项目是基于对软件工程师如何在专门针对的应用程序中处理类似挑战的观察。软件工程师寻求创建专门而灵活的代码，普遍的方法是开发精心制作的算法和数据结构库，这些库在输入、输出和存储值的类型上是多态的。关键思想是利用软件工程师已经投入和探索多态硬件专门化的努力，以多态算法特定单元和多态数据结构特定单元的形式用于基于模板的软件库。该项目使用垂直集成的方法从多种角度研究多态硬件专门化，包括计算机体系结构、硬件综合、编译器优化和运行时系统。作为该项目的一部分开发的技术将是解决物理设计问题的重要一步，这些问题可能会破坏现代社会各个方面不断提高的计算性能的长期趋势。

Serious physical design issues are breaking down traditional abstractionsin computer systems and motivating computer architects to turn tohardware specialization. Hardware specialized for a single task willalmost always be of higher performance and more efficient, in terms ofsilicon area and energy consumption, compared to a flexible hardwareimplementation that can handle many different tasks. Resolving thistension between less efficient general architectures and more efficientspecialized architectures, particularly within the context of mainstreamcomputing platforms, is one of the grand challenges facing the computerarchitecture community.The project is based on an observation of how software engineers addressanalogous challenges in the very applications targeted forspecialization. Software engineers seek to create specialized yetflexible code, and the ubiquitous approach is to develop carefullycrafted libraries of algorithms and data structures that are polymorphicover the types of input, output, and stored values. The key idea is toleverage the effort software engineers have already invested and explorepolymorphic hardware specialization in the form of polymorphicalgorithm-specific units and polymorphic data-structure-specific unitsfor template-based software libraries. The project is using a verticallyintegrated approach to investigate polymorphic hardware specializationfrom a variety of perspectives including computer architecture, hardwaresynthesis, compiler optimization, and runtime systems. The techniquesdeveloped as part of this project will be an important step towardsaddressing the physical design issues, which threaten to disrupt thelong-standing trend towards ever increasing computing performance reliedon by all aspects of modern society.