PhD in Computer Science

On raising the level of abstraction in the simulation of the microthreaded many-cores architecture

Academic year 2012/2013

Sommario del corso

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Course objectives

The Computer Systems Architecture (CSA) group at the University of Amsterdam

(UvA) has designed a general-purpose many-cores architecture called the

Microgrid. It is based on the microthreading model with dataflow scheduling and

asynchronous completion in the execution of the instructions to achieve

fine-grained latency tolerance. It has many simple and energy efficient cores

on a single chip. Through hardware concurrency management it is possible to

partition the chip and dynamically allocate different software components to

different parts of the chip. Ideally computer architects want a design to be

quickly realized in silicon. However, the realization in silicon is expensive

and require a lot of engineering work therefore the design must be fully

evaluated. An alternative approach is to built an FPGA prototype, but again

because of the complexity and development time it is not always the preferred

approach at the beginning stage of the design. The most commonly used approach

is to develop cycle-accurate simulator soon after the design is proposed.

Evaluating the architecture parameters and mapping software components to

different parts of the chip to achieve efficiency are both complex simulation

problems. A cycle-accurate simulator is less complex and require little

development time compared to an FPGA prototype and it can simulate all the

components in detail to achieve the same accuracy. However, when exploring

large design spaces, as found in the Microgrid, the simulation time becomes a

limiting factor. The alternative is to trade off some accuracy with the

simulation time for a typical simulation experiment. At University of Amsterdam

we have investigated high-level simulation techniques using a co-simulation

approach. Although this approach is not restricted to the Microgrid, it is

evaluated in this context. We have added the system-level simulation framework

to the designer's toolbox which complements the cycle-accurate simulator with

some simulation technique that are fast, reasonably accurate and useful for

design space exploration.

Class schedule

Note

The lecture will be held by

Irfan Uddin, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino

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