SHF: Small: Toward Soft Near-threshold Voltage Computing

展望未来，计算机系统中的一个根本挑战是电源墙，由于技术扩展的不平衡，并不是可以放在多核芯片中的所有内核都能同时通电。Power Wall正在改变系统堆栈的所有级别，包括多核架构环境--本项目的重点。与传统操作相比，近阈值电压计算(NTC)将功率提高了一个数量级以上(能效提高了几倍)，因此有可能阻止电力墙的发展。然而，要释放国家技术委员会S的能效潜力，必须攻克国家技术委员会的关键障碍--有限的并行度和对参数变化的更高脆弱性。本项目建议利用新兴的R(生态识别)、M(宁)、S(合成)应用程序的可伸缩性和隐式容错特性来克服NTC障碍。该项目不仅将解决NTC的关键障碍以释放NTC？S的能效潜力，而且还将提供工具和模型来量化这些障碍在系统层面的影响。交付成果将帮助架构界推理和探索如何在能够以接近阈值的低电压运行的不久的未来系统中权衡能效和弹性。

Looking forward, a fundamental challenge in computer systems is the Power Wall, where, due to imbalances in technology scaling, not all the cores that can be placed in a many-core chip can be powered on at the same time. The Power Wall is transforming all levels of the system stack, including the many-core architecture landscape -- the focus of this project. By improving power more than an order of magnitude (and energy efficiency, several times) over conventional operation, near-threshold voltage computing (NTC) has the potential to push back the Power Wall. To unlock NTC?s energy efficiency potential, however, critical barriers to NTC -- limited degree of parallelism and higher vulnerability to parametric variation -- must be attacked. This project suggests leveraging scaling characteristics and implicit fault tolerance of emerging R(ecognition), M(ining), S(ynthesis) applications in order to overcome NTC barriers.This project will not only address critical barriers of NTC to unlock NTC?s energy efficiency potential, but also deliver tools and models to quantify the implications of these barriers at the system level. The deliverables will help the architecture community in reasoning about and exploring how to trade-off energy efficiency for resiliency in near-future systems capable of operating atas low voltages as near-threshold.