CAREER: Combating Dark Silicon through Specialization: Communication-Aware Tiled Many-Accelerator Architectures

研究人员预测，在未来几年，计算机行业？由于一种被称为“暗硅”的情况，计算机性能的稳步增长将会放缓，甚至完全停止。暗硅是功率密度增加的结果，这将使微芯片的部分断电成为必要。“暗硅”的影响可能是广泛的，限制了社会各个方面——从医学、商业到娱乐----——从计算机技术的进步中获得的越来越多的好处。一个解决方案是专业化。随着能够从C等高级编程语言生成电路的高级合成工具的出现，现在可以实现任何应用程序的专用加速器，其效率是通用微处理器的10-100倍。计算行业需要新的架构范例来组织成千上万的加速器。该项目设想未来的计算平台由特定领域的块组成，每个块有10-100个专门的加速器。研究团队将通过两个方面的创新来推进这一愿景。首先，发明了一种新的内存互连子系统，能够为这些专门的核心提供数据。其次，将为不同的应用领域发明规范块，这些应用领域可以被更广泛的研究社区研究。该团队将以一种识别许多加速器架构的独特特征的方式研究内存互连系统：加速器的间歇性使用，通信的爆发，以及在专门核心之间共享内存的需要。在设计多加速器的块时，团队将开发一种新的描述语言来描述块的计算和通信能力，并将它们与工作负载的图形表示相匹配。为了提供更广泛的影响，该项目开发的工具、规范设计和模型将提供给更广泛的研究社区，以支持专业架构的研究和最终商业化。由于提高公众的技术素养对培养负责任的行为至关重要，综合教育计划侧重于所有年龄组：通过讲习班和演讲向K-12学生提供；本科生和研究生通过研究机会和课程设置；以及整个费城社区。

Researchers have predicted that, in the coming years, the computer industry?s steady gains in computing performance will slow and even cease all together because of a condition known as Dark Silicon. Dark Silicon is the result of an increase in power density that will make it necessary to leave sections of a microchip powered off. The consequences of Dark Silicon could be widespread, limiting the increasing benefits all aspects of society---from medicine, commerce to entertainment----have reaped from advances in computing. One solution is specialization. With the advent of high-level synthesis tools capable of generating circuits from high-level programming languages such as C, it is now possible to realize specialized accelerators for any application with 10-100x the efficiency of general purpose microprocessors. The computing industry needs new architecture paradigms to organize thousands of these accelerators. This project envisions the computing platform of the future as comprised of domain specific tiles, each with 10-100 specialized accelerators. The research team will advance this vision with innovations in two aspects. First, by inventing a new memory-interconnect subsystem capable of keeping these specialized cores fed with data. Second, canonical tiles will be invented for different application domains that can be studied by the wider research community. The team will study memory-interconnect systems for tiles in a manner that recognizes the unique features of many-accelerator architectures: intermittent usage of accelerators, bursts of communication, and the need to share memory between specialized cores. While designing tiles of many-accelerators, the team will develop a new description language that describes the computation and communication capabilities of a tile and matches them with a graph representation of the workload. To provide broader impact, the tools, canonical designs, and models developed by this project will be made available to the wider research community to enable the study and eventual commercialization of specialized architectures. As increasing the technological literacy of the general public is essential to cultivating responsible behavior, the integrated educational plan focuses on all age groups: it reaches K-12 students through workshops and presentations; undergraduate and graduate students through research opportunities and course offerings; and the greater Philadelphia community.