C3D: Communication Centric Computer Design

我们正处于计算设备设计的关键时刻。技术规模更倾向于晶体管而不是电线，这使我们进入了一个通信比计算本身花费更多时间和消耗更多能量的时代。我们相信，从硬件和软件的角度来看，这种技术驱动因素不可避免地将我们推向以通信为中心的计算机系统设计方法。这项拨款申请的重点是探索这种新的以通信为中心的计算机系统设计观点，从工程布线到计算机体系结构、编译器设计、语言设计和应用映射。这是我们的愿望，这一资助形式的项目组合解决未来的计算系统涉及数千个节能处理器。以通信为中心的设计可以从几个抽象层次来看待：0级-实现技术，我们将重点关注芯片上的通信网络。1级-计算机体系结构，专注于优化系统中的通信流。第2级-算法映射，允许在多核计算表面上自动放置数据和代码。第3级——编程语言和编译器的设计使并行性和局部性易于表达。还将构建基于FPGA的仿真基础设施，以便从0级和1级的硬件工作中获得研究结果，并有效地支持2级和3级进行的软件研究。

We are at a pivotal point in the design of computational devices.Technology scaling favours transistors over wires which has moved usinto an era where communication takes more time and consumes morepower than the computation itself. We believe that this technologydriver inextricably pushes us toward a communication-centric approachto computer system design from both hardware and softwareperspectives. This grant application is focused on exploring this newcommunication-centric view of computer system design from engineeringwires through computer architecture, compiler design, language designand application mapping. It is our wish that this grant form aportfolio of projects tackling future computational systems involvingthousands of power efficient processors.Communication-centric design can be viewed at several levels ofabstraction:Level 0 - implementation technology, where we will focus oncommunication networks-on-chip.Level 1 - computer architecture, focusing on optimisation ofcommunication flows in the system.Level 2 - algorithm mapping to allow automated placement of data andcode across a manycore computing surface.Level 3 - programming language and compiler design to allowparallelism and locality to be easily expressed.An FPGA based simulation infrastructure will also be constructed toallow research results to be obtained from hardware work at levels 0and 1, and to efficiently support software research undertaken atlevels 2 and 3.