CAREER: Combating Dark Silicon through Specialization: Communication-Aware Tiled Many-Accelerator Architectures

职业：通过专业化对抗暗硅：通信感知平铺多加速器架构

• 批准号: 1350624
• 负责人: Mark Hempstead
• 金额: $ 47万
• 依托单位: Drexel University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-02-01 至 2016-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1350624&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Combating; Dark; Silicon; through

Researchers have predicted that, in the coming years, the computer industry?s steady gains in computing performance will slow and even cease all together because of a condition known as Dark Silicon. Dark Silicon is the result of an increase in power density that will make it necessary to leave sections of a microchip powered off. The consequences of Dark Silicon could be widespread, limiting the increasing benefits all aspects of society---from medicine, commerce to entertainment----have reaped from advances in computing. One solution is specialization. With the advent of high-level synthesis tools capable of generating circuits from high-level programming languages such as C, it is now possible to realize specialized accelerators for any application with 10-100x the efficiency of general purpose microprocessors. The computing industry needs new architecture paradigms to organize thousands of these accelerators. This project envisions the computing platform of the future as comprised of domain specific tiles, each with 10-100 specialized accelerators. The research team will advance this vision with innovations in two aspects. First, by inventing a new memory-interconnect subsystem capable of keeping these specialized cores fed with data. Second, canonical tiles will be invented for different application domains that can be studied by the wider research community. The team will study memory-interconnect systems for tiles in a manner that recognizes the unique features of many-accelerator architectures: intermittent usage of accelerators, bursts of communication, and the need to share memory between specialized cores. While designing tiles of many-accelerators, the team will develop a new description language that describes the computation and communication capabilities of a tile and matches them with a graph representation of the workload. To provide broader impact, the tools, canonical designs, and models developed by this project will be made available to the wider research community to enable the study and eventual commercialization of specialized architectures. As increasing the technological literacy of the general public is essential to cultivating responsible behavior, the integrated educational plan focuses on all age groups: it reaches K-12 students through workshops and presentations; undergraduate and graduate students through research opportunities and course offerings; and the greater Philadelphia community.

研究人员预测，在未来几年中，计算机行业的计算性能稳定增长将减慢甚至停止，因为这种情况称为“黑硅”。深色硅是功率密度增加的结果，这将使您有必要将微芯片的部分关闭。黑暗硅的后果可能是广泛的，从而限制了社会各个方面的增长 - 从医学，商业到娱乐 - 从计算机的进步中获得了收获。一种解决方案是专业化。随着高级合成工具的出现，能够从C等高级编程语言（例如C）生成电路，现在可以实现任何使用10-100X的应用程序的专门加速器，这是通用微处理器的效率。计算行业需要新的建筑范例来组织数千个这样的加速器。该项目设想了未来的计算平台，该平台由特定于域的瓷砖组成，每个图块都有10-100个专用加速器。研究团队将通过两个方面的创新来提高这一愿景。首先，通过发明一个新的内存内部连接子系统，能够将这些专业核心保留为数据。其次，将针对更广泛的研究社区可以研究的不同应用领域发明规范瓷砖。该团队将以识别多个加速器体系结构的独特功能的方式来研究瓷砖的内存间接系统：间歇用法的加速器，通信爆发以及在专用核心之间共享内存的需求。在设计多个加速器的瓷砖时，团队将开发一种新的描述语言，描述瓷砖的计算和通信功能，并与工作负载的图表表示。为了提供更广泛的影响，该项目开发的工具，规范设计和模型将提供给更广泛的研究社区，以实现专业体系结构的研究和最终商业化。由于提高公众的技术素养对于培养负责任的行为至关重要，因此综合的教育计划侧重于所有年龄段：它通过研讨会和演讲来吸引K-12学生；通过研究机会和课程提供的本科生和研究生；和大费城社区。