FoMR: IPC-MASTA: Boosting IPC with Microarchitectural Support for Tightly-Coupled Accelerators

五十多年来，高性能微处理器的进步为社会带来了无数好处，包括在许多科学学科和医疗保健服务方面取得了前所未有的进步，提高了经济效益和生产率，创造了新的娱乐形式，创造了全新的行业和商业模式。然而，计算行业和半导体技术都处于十字路口，需要新的方法来维持性能提高的历史趋势，并克服传统方法在提高处理器性能方面所面临的障碍。在最近的设计中采用的一种很有前途的方法是将特定功能的硬件加速器集成到处理器旁边，从而实现从通用CPU高效且高性能地卸载常见的、粗粒度的计算密集型操作-例如视频数据的解码。这个项目将探索这种方法的一个新兴变体，其中加速器被设计为执行频繁的细粒度操作，与处理器核心紧密耦合，预计将更加灵活、广泛适用，并且更容易集成到当今绝大多数程序员熟悉的软件开发模型中。这项研究有望带来几个实用的人工制品以及科学和概念上的进步，使未来微处理器的设计者能够更容易地集成这些加速器，以及准备和培训具有通过未来就业直接技术转移潜力的研究生。本项目试图对紧耦合加速器(TCA)进行详细研究，揭示将它们集成到现代处理器中的权衡和复杂性。到目前为止，对可能对整体处理器性能和功耗产生关键影响的许多设计考虑因素的特征和优化工作还很少。该项目将分三个阶段解决这个问题。初始阶段将开发一个分析模型，用于评估将技术合作协定纳入高性能中央处理器的影响。接下来，对TCA的微体系结构影响的全面研究将揭示集成TCA的关键设计挑战、机会和新颖的解决方案。最后阶段将调查可重新配置的TCA，它们旨在实现专业加速和广泛适用性这两个看似矛盾的目标。该项目将调查使用我们的可重新配置的TCA架构实现通用加速的几种方法，表明在不投入大量硬件资源或设计工作的情况下，可以同时实现专门化和通用化。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Over fifty years of advances in high-performance microprocessors have enabled countless benefits to society, including unprecedented advances in many scientific disciplines and healthcare delivery, improvements in economic efficiency and productivity, new forms of entertainment, and the creation of entirely new industries and business models. However, both the computing industry and semiconductor technology are at a cross-roads, and new approaches are needed to sustain the historical trend of performance increases and overcome the barriers faced by conventional approaches to improving processor performance. A promising approach employed in recent designs has been to integrate function-specific hardware accelerators next to the processor, enabling efficient and high-performance offloading of common, coarse-grained, compute-intensive operations—such as decoding of video data—from the general-purpose CPU. This project will explore an emerging variant of this approach, where the accelerators are designed to perform frequent, fine-grained operations, are coupled tightly to the processor core, and are expected to be more flexible, broadly applicable, and easier to integrate into the software development model familiar to the vast majority of today’s programmers. This research is expected to lead to several practical artifacts along with scientific and conceptual advances that will enable designers of future microprocessors to more easily integrate such accelerators, as well as preparation and training of graduate students with potential for direct technology transfer through their future employment.This project seeks to conduct a detailed study of tightly-coupled accelerators (TCAs), uncovering the trade-offs and complexities of integrating them into modern processors. To date, little has been done to characterize and optimize the many design considerations that can have critical impact on overall processor performance and power consumption. The project will approach this problem in three phases. The initial phase will develop an analytical model for assessing the impact of integrating TCAs in high-performance CPUs. Next, a comprehensive study of the microarchitectural implications of TCAs will uncover key design challenges, opportunities, and novel solutions for integrating TCAs. The final phase will investigate reconfigurable TCAs, which are intended to achieve the seemingly contradictory goals of specialized acceleration as well as broad applicability. The project will investigate several avenues for general-purpose acceleration using our reconfigurable TCA architecture, showing that it is possible to reap the best of both worlds of specialization and generalization without dedicating significant hardware real estate nor design effort.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.