SHF: Medium: Collaborative Research: Ultra-Responsive Architectures for Mobile Platforms

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Conventional microprocessors are designed primarily for sustainedperformance; they can operate at near-peak performance essentiallyindefinitely until their energy source is exhausted. In battery andcooling constrained environments such as mobile devices, sustained power(and, consequently, peak performance) must be limited to at most a fewwatts so that the device can dissipate heat using only passiveconvection. However, many interactive mobile applications (such ashandwriting/speech recognition or image-based search) instead call forbursts of intense computation in response to user input, creating theneed for a new ultra-responsive operating regime: rather than limit peakpower assuming sustained operation, systems should instead exploit heatstorage to enable brief computation bursts that greatly exceedsustainable thermal limits without overheating. This projectinvestigates an approach called "computational sprinting", the centralessence of which is to compute at unsustainable rates but only brieflyso that temperatures do not reach unsafe levels.The goal of this project is to address the architectural, thermal,electrical, and software barriers to ultra-responsiveness viacomputational sprinting. In particular, the project explores: (1)architectures and memory systems that sprint via parallelism (activatingtens of reserve functional units/cores) and voltage boosting(overdriving cores for single-thread performance) while facilitatingfast burst onsets; (2) thermal designs that improve thermal responsebehavior to enable longer and more intense sprints; (3) mobile-optimized electrical designs that provide stable supply voltagesdespite current surges of an order-of-magnitude or more; and (4) software mechanisms that explicitly manage limited thermal budgets and anticipate and stage data needed during the sprint. The projectincludes the fabrication of an experimental testbed to approximate thecomputational, thermal and electrical capabilities of a future many-coremobile device and to provide practical experience with sprinting.Project impacts include (1) developing and advancing techniques forimproving the responsiveness of mobile devices and (2) integrating thediscoveries into a new cross-departmental course on computer systemdesign.