Visiting researcher application: Massive Multiprocessor Architectures

访问研究员申请：大规模多处理器架构

• 批准号: EP/F040237/1
• 负责人: Simon Moore
• 金额: $ 4.22万
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2008 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FF040237%2F1
• 关键词: Visiting; researcher; application; Massive; Multiprocessor

The proposal is to support an extended visit to the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge from Professor Andrew Brown, from Southampton. The headline objective is to undertake a feasibility study and design a strategy for an extended collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton and Manchester.Southampton and Manchester have a grant entitled A scalable chip multiprocessor for large-scale neural simulation (EP/D079594/01). A year into this, it has become clear that the potential application arena for the architecture being developed extends far beyond the initial mandate of neural simulation. Cambridge are building a FPGA based hardware /software infrastructure to enable manycore parallel computer architectures to be simulated in (near) real time. They have a recently awarded grant entitle C3D - Communication Centric Computer Design (EP/F018649/1). Conventional parallel processing systems are large and expensive, and provide hundreds or thousands of processing nodes. Large scale distributed systems (seti@home et al) potentially provide millions of cores, but with extremely limiting bandwidth constraints.The work at Cambridge/Southampton/Manchester has the potential - for the first time - to make available a tightly-coupled, scalable, million core+ architecture. Brushing aside for the moment such fundamental issues as how one might even design a pan-processor compiler for such a system, one of many unanswered questions is What might we do with it if we had one? Although applications have a way of migrating themselves towards useful architectures, attempting to foresee the sphere of use as early as possible in the design stage has obvious benefits to the design process at many levels of granularity.Potential application arenas include:* Neural simulation (the focus of the existing Southampton/Manchester grant)* Discrete and continuous system/network simulation* Finite element analysis* Ray-tracing and rendering* Protein folding prediction* Data-mining, pre-emptive disaster predictionThis visit will support the construction of a detailed roadmap describing the research to be undertaken; one particular application (protein folding) pursued in a little more detail; and the feasibility of bringing together the two threads of activity (the Manchester/Southampton scalable architecture and the Cambrudge FPGA farm) assessed in some detail.

该提案是为了支持来自南安普敦的安德鲁·布朗教授对剑桥的计算机实验室的长期访问。标题目标是对剑桥，南安普敦和曼彻斯特大学之间的扩展合作进行可行性研究，并为大型神经模拟（EP/D079594/01）提供了一项赠款。一年来，很明显，开发的架构的潜在应用领域远远超出了神经模拟的最初任务。剑桥正在构建基于FPGA的硬件 /软件基础架构，以实现多个核心并行计算机体系结构（接近）实时。他们拥有最近授予的赠款权利C3D-以通信为中心的计算机设计（EP/F018649/1）。常规的并行处理系统又大且昂贵，并提供数百或数千个处理节点。大规模分布式系统（Seti@Home等人）可能会提供数百万个内核，但具有极限的带宽约束。剑桥/南安普敦/曼彻斯特的工作有可能首次提供一个紧密耦合，可扩展的，可扩展的，可扩展的，百万的核心+体系结构。暂时刷了一步，例如人们甚至如何为这种系统设计一个泛处理的编译器，众多未解决的问题之一是，如果我们有一个问题，我们会怎么做？尽管应用程序具有一种向有用体系结构迁移的方式，但在设计阶段尝试尽早预测使用范围的使用范围在许多级别的粒度级别上具有明显的好处。潜在的应用领域包括：*神经模拟：*神经模拟（现有的南安普敦/曼彻斯特授予的重点）数据挖掘，先发制人的灾难预测这一访问将支持构建详细的路线图，描述要进行的研究；一种特殊的应用（蛋白质折叠），更详细地进行；以及将两个活动线程（曼彻斯特/南安普敦可扩展建筑和Cambrudge FPGA农场）汇集在一起​​的可行性。