CAREER: Energy-Efficient and Energy-Proportional Silicon-Photonic Manycore Architectures

职业：节能且能量均衡的硅光子众核架构

• 批准号: 1453853
• 负责人: Nikos Hardavellas
• 金额: $ 47万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-05-01 至 2021-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1453853&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Energy; Efficient; Proportional; Silicon

Increasing energy demands have put computing on an unsustainable technological, economic and environmental path. Unfortunately, a large fraction of this energy is wasted, with data transfers being one of the major contributors to energy consumption. At the same time, while the demand for computing grows, modern microprocessors are increasingly constrained by physical limitations, which prevent them from realizing their full potential. Area, power, thermal, off-chip bandwidth, and yield limitations constrain single-chip designs to a relatively small number of cores, beyond which scaling becomes impractical. Multi-chip designs can overcome these limitations, but require a cross-chip interconnect with bandwidth, latency, and energy efficiency characteristics well beyond the reach of conventional electrical signaling. Introduction of nano-photonic interconnects, as undertaken in this proposal, can meet these requirements and allow systems to break free of the limitations of single-chip designs. Within the context of this research, a rigorous educational plan is also integrated into the research agenda that strongly connects research to education, and enhances the participation of minorities and undergraduates in research. This project capitalizes on existing collaborations with the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University to implement innovative educational approaches, Northwestern?s Science in Society outreach initiatives for the general public, and Northwestern?s Office of STEM Education Partnerships to develop K-12 STEM outreach activities with outreach potential extending to 140+ schools in the Chicago metropolitan area, reaching 368 teachers and 30,000 students.Specific technical aspects of this research aims to develop scalable, energy-efficient, and energy-proportional interconnects for future multicores. To achieve this vision, the research seeks to understand and mitigate the energy inefficiencies of the dominant power consumers in silicon-photonics. The project involves a cross-cutting approach to combine developments in novel materials, emerging devices, and 3D-stacking with research in architectural and micro-architectural techniques, memory systems, the runtime environment, and the operating system, to develop adaptive techniques that minimize the energy consumed by nano-photonic interconnects without sacrificing their performance. The overall effort culminates on the design of a virtual macro-chip, a disaggregated many-core design supported by a silicon-photonic interconnect that reaches scales of thousands of cores, at a performance and power level impossible to realize with conventional technology.

不断增长的能源需求使计算走上了一条不可持续的技术、经济和环境道路。不幸的是，这些能源中有很大一部分被浪费了，而数据传输是能源消耗的主要贡献者之一。与此同时，随着计算需求的增长，现代微处理器越来越受到物理限制的限制，这使它们无法充分发挥其潜力。面积、功耗、散热、片外带宽和产量限制将单芯片设计限制在相对较少的内核数量上，超过这一数量，扩展变得不切实际。 多芯片设计可以克服这些限制，但需要跨芯片互连，其带宽、延迟和能效特性远远超出传统电信号的范围。 如本提案所述，纳米光子互连的引入可以满足这些要求，并允许系统摆脱单芯片设计的限制。在这项研究的范围内，还将一项严格的教育计划纳入研究议程，将研究与教育紧密联系起来，并加强少数群体和大学生对研究的参与。该项目利用现有的合作与塞尔中心的教学卓越在西北大学实施创新的教育方法，西北？的科学在社会推广计划，为公众和西北？的STEM教育合作伙伴办公室开发K-12 STEM推广活动，推广潜力扩展到芝加哥大都市区的140多所学校，达到368名教师和30，000名学生。这项研究的具体技术方面旨在为未来的多核开发可扩展的，节能的和能源比例的互连。为了实现这一愿景，该研究旨在了解和减轻硅光子学中占主导地位的电力消费者的能源效率低下。该项目涉及一个交叉的方法，联合收割机在新材料，新兴器件和3D堆叠的发展与建筑和微建筑技术，内存系统，运行时环境和操作系统的研究，开发自适应技术，最大限度地减少纳米光子互连所消耗的能量，而不牺牲其性能。整体努力的高潮是虚拟宏芯片的设计，这是一种由硅光子互连支持的分散式多核设计，可达到数千个核心的规模，其性能和功率水平是传统技术无法实现的。