C3D: Communication Centric Computer Design

我们正处于计算设备设计的关键时刻。技术扩展有利于晶体管而不是电线，这已经将我们带入了一个通信比计算本身花费更多时间和消耗更多功率的时代。我们相信，这种技术驱动力不可避免地推动我们走向以通信为中心的方法，以计算机系统设计从硬件和软件的角度来看。这项拨款申请的重点是探索这种新的以通信为中心的计算机系统设计的观点，从工程线到计算机体系结构，编译器设计，语言设计和应用程序映射。我们希望这项资助能够形成一个解决未来计算系统的项目，该系统涉及数千个节能处理器。以通信为中心的设计可以从几个抽象层次来看待：0级-实现技术，我们将专注于片上通信网络。1级-计算机架构，专注于优化系统中的通信流。2级-算法映射，允许在众核计算表面上自动放置数据和代码。3级-编程语言和编译器设计，使并行性和局部性很容易表达。一个基于FPGA的仿真基础设施也将被构建，使研究结果从硬件工作中获得的水平0和1，并有效地支持软件研究进行atlevels 2和3。

We are at a pivotal point in the design of computational devices.Technology scaling favours transistors over wires which has moved usinto an era where communication takes more time and consumes morepower than the computation itself. We believe that this technologydriver inextricably pushes us toward a communication-centric approachto computer system design from both hardware and softwareperspectives. This grant application is focused on exploring this newcommunication-centric view of computer system design from engineeringwires through computer architecture, compiler design, language designand application mapping. It is our wish that this grant form aportfolio of projects tackling future computational systems involvingthousands of power efficient processors.Communication-centric design can be viewed at several levels ofabstraction:Level 0 - implementation technology, where we will focus oncommunication networks-on-chip.Level 1 - computer architecture, focusing on optimisation ofcommunication flows in the system.Level 2 - algorithm mapping to allow automated placement of data andcode across a manycore computing surface.Level 3 - programming language and compiler design to allowparallelism and locality to be easily expressed.An FPGA based simulation infrastructure will also be constructed toallow research results to be obtained from hardware work at levels 0and 1, and to efficiently support software research undertaken atlevels 2 and 3.