Guest Speaker
Over-provisioned Multicore Systems
Koushik Chakraborty
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Feb 28 2008 3:30PM
480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are invited to attend.
Refreshments will be served prior to the talk.
Abstract:
Technology scaling has provided system designers with an exploding transistor budget, far more than what was available when the core principles behind many existing commodity microprocessors were envisioned. An increasingly prominent trend that I observe indicates a substantial drop in the fraction of active chip area in future generation microprocessors. This trend will impact several fundamental principles of computer architecture, where architects must now consider novel use of inactive area for meeting their design goals.
In this talk, I will illustrate one embodiment of this new design paradigm in Over-provisioned Multicore Systems (OPMS). By design, OPMS provision more core resources than allowed by their power envelope. Computation is dynamically assigned to a subset of these processing cores, allowing individual cores to transition between active and inactive states. To demonstrate the potential of this design, we employ Computation Spreading that attempts to collocate similar computation fragments from multiple threads, while distributing dissimilar fragments from a single thread in a multithreaded application. Such a locality enhancement technique improves the performance and energy efficiency of the system by effectively using inactive core resources. In summary, OPMS designs enable a tremendous flexibility in assigning computation on processing cores, creating a framework for innovative techniques in future microprocessors.
Host: P Sadayappan
* Koushik Chakraborty is a CSE faculty candidate
