CSR: Small: Accelerating Towards the Hardware Specialization Era: A Holistic Approach

由于基本功率的限制，晶体管的能效没有得到提高，从而使计算机芯片的功率受到限制。如果在构建微处理器硬件的方法上没有重大创新，我们已经习惯的性能改进就无法持续。SIMD加速器和GPU的商业成功以及新的计算机硬件研究概念证明了使用加速器的专业化是一个有希望的前进方向。显然，在加速器的设计空间中有很多选择，从它们针对的工作的粒度、它们加速的基准处理器、编译和执行模型，以及呈现给应用程序开发人员的抽象。这种广泛的选择带来了一个基本问题，即不存在用于推理这一广泛设计空间的工具和应用程序框架。这个项目的总体目标是开发涵盖加速器设计空间的量化工具、机制和详细的应用研究。该项目为专业化时代提供了一系列技术：一个指导微处理器设计和应用程序开发人员推理加速器、体系结构机制和高度优化的加速器应用程序的新框架。这些工具和机制有助于在未来功率受限的技术世代中保持性能改进。该项目的原型系统、模拟增强功能和编译器框架作为社区工具发布。该项目对计算物理应用的关注有许多用途，通过使从虚拟手术到在雪地上建模车辆穿越的应用能够对广泛的社会产生积极影响。作为该项目的一部分，私人投资机构继续指导代表人数不足的学生和本科生。

Due to fundamental power limitations, the energy efficiency of transistors is not improving, thus making computer chips power limited. Without significant innovations in the ways to build microprocessor hardware, the performance improvements that we have grown accustomed to cannot be sustained. Specialization using accelerators, and thereby reducing power, is a promising way forward, as evidenced by the commercial success of SIMD-accelerators and GPUs, and by new computer hardware research concepts. Clearly there are very many choices in this design space of accelerators, ranging from the granularity of the work they target, the baseline processor they accelerate, compilation and execution model, and abstraction presented to the application developer. This wide choice introduces a fundamental problem in that tools and application frameworks do not exist for reasoning about this wide design space. This project's over-arching goal is to develop quantitative tools, mechanisms, and detailed application studies covering the design space of accelerators.The project provides an array of techniques for the specialization era: a novel framework to guide microprocessor designs and application developers to reason about accelerators, architecture mechanisms, and highly optimized applications for accelerators. The tools and mechanisms help sustain performance improvements in future power-constrained technology generations. The project's prototype system, simulation enhancements, and compiler framework are released as tools for the community. The project's focus on computational-physics applications has numerous uses that positively impact broad swaths of society by enabling applications ranging from virtual surgery to modeling vehicle traversal on snow terrains. The PIs continue mentoring under-represented students and undergraduate students as part of this project.