SHF: Small: Multi-Core Architecture, Applications, and Tools Co-Design

技术限制、新兴应用和不断变化的可用性趋势正在引领多核计算机系统的新时代。应用程序和微处理器设计的一个关键问题是，应用程序在很大程度上是独立于微处理器的架构开发而发展的。这是架构研究的一个问题，因为开发高效的架构解决方案需要对下一代应用程序进行现实的描述。从系统设计的角度来看，理解应用程序行为对于构建一个高效的系统是至关重要的，因为必须对它们进行优化，以利用体系结构中提供的机制。该提案旨在重新思考下一代多核系统，包括软件和硬件架构，使用最先进的定量设计工具。本研究探讨的两个关键思想如下。首先，是一个混合任务级/数据级并行执行模型，用于新兴应用程序，这些应用程序具有丰富的并行性，但不是无同步的并行性。第二，是开发新的高度准确和高效的定量模型，以评估架构和应用程序设计备选方案，在规模和广泛的应用程序工作负载范围内。该项目旨在提供一套定量工具，以关闭设计、评估和分析软件在硬件上的行为的开发循环，允许对软件和硬件进行调整。该项目将实时图形作为一个挑战应用，并衍生出一个完整的系统，称为哥白尼，用于未来的实时图形，可以提供显着更高的图像一致性。该项目还将把这些定量模型纳入课程，并向研究界传播。本研究中提出的创新有可能极大地帮助未来系统的微处理器和应用开发。光线追踪的完整系统规范的开发可以触发可编程处理器和专用图形处理器的演变。

Technology limitations, emerging applications, and changing usability trends are ushering in a new era in multi-core computer systems. A key problem for both application and microprocessor design is that applications are largely evolving independently from the architectural development of microprocessors. This is a problem for architectural research because developing efficient architectural solutions requires realistic characterization of the next generation applications. From a system design perspective, understanding application behavior is crucial for building an efficient system, since they must be optimized to exploit mechanisms provided in the architecture. This proposal seeks to re-think next generation multi-core systems - both softwareand hardware architectures using state-of-the-art quantitative designtools.The two key ideas explored in this research are the following. First, is a hybrid task-level/data-level parallelism execution model for emerging applications that have abundant but not synchronization-free parallelism. Second, is the development of new highly accurate and efficient quantitative models to evaluate architecture and application design alternatives, at scale and over a wide range of application workloads. The project seeks to provide a suite of quantitative tools to close the development loop of design, evaluation and analysis of software's behavior on hardware, allowing the tuning of both software and hardware. This project takes real-time graphics as a challenge application and derives a full system, called Copernicus, for future real-time graphics that can provide significantly higher imagequalities. The project will also integrate these quantitative models in the curriculum and disseminate to the research community.The innovations proposed in this research have the potential for significantly aiding microprocessor and application development for future systems. The development of a full system specification for ray-tracing can trigger an inflection in the evolution of both programmable processors andspecialized graphics processors.