SBIR Phase I: vCore: Realizing an Accelerated Virtual Core on Commodity Multicore Processors

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目旨在证明多核计算机系统虚拟化技术的技术和商业可行性，从移动客户端到服务器云。尽管多核处理器提供了巨大的性能潜力，但大多数现有的应用程序是顺序的，许多新应用程序是用顺序语言编写的，因为大多数主流程序员最熟悉顺序编程。即使应用程序是并行的，实现高性能也是乏味的，因为程序员必须针对每个目标系统定制他们的代码。随着每个处理器的核心数量不断增加，关键的挑战是如何利用这些核心来提供更高的性能。多核处理器并行执行代码，但是编写和调试显式并行程序比编写和调试顺序程序要困难得多。本提案的目标是证明所提议的技术为多核系统带来了可实现的、可扩展的性能，这些性能将利用当前的主流架构，并带来多核平台所承诺的增强性能。如果成功部署，该技术所提供的卓越性能和能源效率将使单核平台上无法实现的创新应用和服务成为可能。该技术允许软件开发人员继续专注于这样的应用程序和服务，而不是将他们的精力分散在底层硬件的并行性提取和调试上。软件用户可以随时利用程序优化方面的专业知识来加速高价值的应用程序。这项技术为移动设备和个人电脑制造商提供了显著改善终端用户体验的能力，使他们的产品在这些竞争激烈的市场中脱颖而出。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project aims to prove the technical and commercial feasibility of a virtualization technology for multicore computer systems, from mobile clients to server clouds. Although multicore processors offer tremendous performance potential, most existing applications are sequential and many new applications are written in sequential languages because the majority of mainstream programmers are most comfortable with sequential programming. Even when applications are parallel, achieving high performance is tedious as programmers must customize their code to each target system. As the number of cores per processor continues to increase, the key challenge is how to make use of these cores to deliver increased performance. Multicore processors execute code in parallel, but writing and debugging explicitly parallel programs is significantly more difficult than writing and debugging a sequential program. The goal of this proposal is to demonstrate that the proposed technology brings realizable, scalable performance to multicore systems which will leverage the current predominant architecture and bring about enhanced performance promised by multicore platforms.The superior performance and energy efficiency delivered by the proposed technology will, if successfully deployed, enable innovative applications and services that were not possible on a single-core platform. The technology allows software developers to continue to focus on such applications and services rather than dividing their efforts with the extraction and debugging of parallelism for the underlying hardware. Software users can readily tap into expertise in program optimization to accelerate high-value applications. The technology provides manufacturers of mobile devices and PCs with the ability to dramatically improve the end user experience, to differentiate their products in these fiercely-competitive markets.