SHF: Small: Toward Soft Near-threshold Voltage Computing

SHF：小型：迈向软近阈值电压计算

• 批准号: 1421988
• 负责人: Ulya Karpuzcu
• 金额: $ 17万
• 依托单位: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2017-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1421988&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Toward; Soft; Near

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.

展望未来，计算机系统的一个根本挑战是电源墙，由于技术扩展的不平衡，并非所有可以放置在多核芯片中的核心都可以同时启动。 Power Wall 正在改变系统堆栈的所有级别，包括多核架构景观——该项目的重点。通过将功率比传统操作提高一个数量级以上（以及能源效率数倍），近阈值电压计算 (NTC) 有可能推倒功率墙。然而，为了释放 NTC 的能源效率潜力，必须克服 NTC 的关键障碍——有限的并行度和对参数变化的更高的脆弱性。 该项目建议利用新兴的 R（识别）、M（合成）、S（合成）应用的扩展特性和隐式容错能力来克服 NTC 障碍。该项目不仅将解决 NTC 的关键障碍，以释放 NTC 的能量效率潜力，同时还提供工具和模型来量化这些障碍在系统级别的影响。这些可交付成果将帮助架构社区思考和探索如何在能够在接近阈值的低电压下运行的近期系统中权衡能源效率和弹性。