II-New: RIVER: A Research Infrastructure to Explore Volatility, Energy-Efficiency, and Resilience

随着摩尔定律的终结，未来的所有计算系统(智能手机、手表、笔记本电脑，甚至云)都必须智能地管理能源、并行性，甚至以可靠性和寿命为代价，以提高计算性能和存储容量。这项艰巨的任务涉及在一个拥有许多设备(数十亿个晶体管)的系统中实时(毫秒)做出决策，以及非常复杂的行为(1亿个线路软件)，对性能或生命周期的影响高达100倍。芝加哥大学探索波动性、能效和弹性的研究基础设施(River)将创建一个科学工具，使我们能够研究这一关键应用程序管理问题，这些应用程序是我们今天的信息系统所依赖的非凡信息访问和智能行为的基础。River项目将设计和创建一个可观察、可控的计算系统(研究基础设施)，其中可靠性、生命周期、功率、易失性、并行性和性能的变化范围可达10,000倍。在灵活的软件控制下，该系统将支持功率上限、时钟速度调整，并支持固态存储的深度定制。所有这些属性都将得到细粒度控制的支持，并得到广泛而详细的监控的补充。研究成果将涉及控制和智能管理计算性能和寿命的新方法，数量上的改进高达100倍；这种巨大的变化可能是这些应用在新的硬件技术现实中的突破性能力。River项目将推进计算机系统、软件、算法和应用研究。由于计算具有广泛的社会重要性，这些核心能力的潜在影响可能会触及政府、教育和商业的许多方面。River系统和工具将在本科生和研究生班级中使用，从而使他们接触到未来的计算现实，并将与其他大学共享，以最大限度地发挥影响。

With the end of Moore's Law, all computing systems (smart phones, watches, laptops, and even the cloud) of the future must intelligently manage energy, parallelism, and even trade reliability and lifetime for increased computing performance and storage capacity. This daunting task involves decision making in real-time (milliseconds), in a system with many devices (billions of transistors), and very complex behavior (100 million line software) with consequences for performance or lifetime as much as 100-fold. The Research Infrastructure to explore Volatility, Energy-efficiency, and Resilience (RIVER) at the University of Chicago will create a scientific vehicle that enables research on this critical management problem for applications that underlie extraordinary information access and intelligent behavior we depend on in today's information systems.The RIVER project will design and create an observable, controllable computing system (a research infrastructure) where reliability, lifetime, power, volatility, parallelism, and performance can be varied across as wide a range as 10,000-fold. Under flexible software control, the system will support power capping, clock speed scaling, and enable deep customization of solid-state storage. All of these properties will be supported with fine-grained control and complemented by extensive detailed monitoring. Research results will involve new ways to control and intelligently manage computing performance and lifetime with quantitative improvements as large as 100-fold; such large change may be breakthrough capabilities for those applications in the new reality of hardware technology. The RIVER project will advance computer systems, software, algorithms, and applications research. Because of the broad societal importance of computing, the potential impact of these core capabilities could touch many aspects of government, education, and commerce. The RIVER system and tools will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes, thus exposing them to realities of future computing, and will be shared with other universities to maximize impact.