SHF: Small: Exploration of energy-optimized computing architectures using integrated voltage regulators

SHF：小型：使用集成稳压器探索能源优化计算架构

• 批准号: 1218298
• 负责人: David Brooks
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-08-01 至 2016-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1218298&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Exploration; energy; optimized

Mobile computing devices such as cellular phones, tablets, and laptop computers have become permanent fixtures of modern-day life. Moreover, users have become accustomed to consistent advances in technology that continue to improve features and usability. For decades, such technological improvements could largely be attributed to Moore's Law, which predicts consistent doubling of transistor count and reductions in costs. For almost as long, people have repeated the now well-known saying, "no exponential lasts forever," and also predicted the eventual end of Moore's Law. It appears that the end might finally be near, which motivates research that identifies inefficiencies and finds opportunities at the intersection of traditionally disparate research areas to improve performance and energy efficiency of devices that span the computing spectrum from mobile to servers in the cloud. This project builds on existing technologies that control the voltage and frequency of microprocessors, but takes them to higher levels of integration and granularity.There are several key challenges that stand to obstruct continued growth in computing. Limitations in power budgets, whether due to high cooling costs in high-performance computing systems or to fixed energy capacity in mobile devices, require innovations that will allow future systems with larger numbers of cores to dynamically adapt to time-varying needs of modern workloads. Integrated voltage regulators provide one of the most promising approaches to address energy and scalability constraints. Integrated voltage regulators offer advantages of nanosecond-scale voltage transition times, more efficient current delivery to the load at high power levels, and significant benefits in form-factor and system-level power management. This project aims to develop a systematic approach to answer questions surrounding the benefits and overheads associated with embedding integrated voltage regulators in future chips.

手机，平板电脑和笔记本电脑等移动计算设备已成为现代生活的永久固定装置。此外，用户已经习惯了继续提高功能和可用性的技术的一致进步。几十年来，这种技术的改进可能在很大程度上归因于摩尔定律，这预测了晶体管数量和成本降低的一致性。几乎很长时间以来，人们就重复了现在众所周知的话：“没有指数持续永远持续下去”，并且还预测了摩尔定律的最终结束。看来终点可能最终临近，这激发了识别效率低下的研究，并在传统上不同的研究领域的交汇处找到了机会，以提高跨越计算频谱从移动设备到云中服务器的计算频谱的设备的性能和能源效率。该项目建立在控制微处理器电压和频率的现有技术的基础上，但使它们达到了更高水平的集成和粒度。有几个关键挑战，可以阻碍计算中持续增长。电力预算的局限性，无论是由于高性能计算系统中的高冷却成本还是移动设备中的固定能源容量，都需要创新，这将允许将来具有较大核心的系统动态适应现代工作负载的时变需求。集成的电压调节器提供了解决能量和可伸缩性约束的最有希望的方法之一。集成的电压调节器提供了纳秒尺度电压过渡时间的优势，在高功率水平下向负载的当前交付效率更高，以及形式因子和系统级功率管理的显着好处。该项目旨在开发一种系统的方法，以回答围绕与将来芯片嵌入集成电压调节器相关的好处和间接费用的问题。