Enabling multicore chips: Bridging the programmability gap in today's parallel systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The last two years have witnessed the introduction of chips that contain more than one processor, commonlyknown as multicore chips. These chips represent the means by which the computer industry will to improve theperformance of computer systems in the foreseeable future: increase the number of processors in a chip withoutnecessarily improving the performance of the single processor. It is expected the number of processors in amulticore chip will double every silicon generation, reaching 100s of processors in a little over a decade.Multicore chips offer tremendous performance improvement potential. Regrettably, this potential may not beeasily delivered to the average consumer. This is because the vast majority of today's software is written toexecute on a single processor. Consumers, accustomed to seeing their programs execute faster on newercomputers, will no longer see such improvements until these programs are (re-)written to execute efficiently onmultiple processors. This process of (re-)writing programs for multicores, referred to as parallel programming,is inherently difficult for software developers and programmers, resulting in a programmability gap. Indeed,multicore manufacturers and software developers/programmers identified this programmability gap as the mainhurdle in exploiting the performance potential of multicores.The goal of our research is to address the programmability gap in multicore chips. We will do so throughinnovations in compilers, run-time support and processor architectures that will (1) facilitate the tasks ofporting existing sequential software to systems with multicore chips; (2) make the tasks of writing parallelprogramming easier and more efficient; and (3) execute parallel programs, whether manually written orgenerated by tools, faster. These innovations will make it easier for software developers to write efficientprograms for multicores and thus deliver their performance potential to end users.