IT/SY(CISE): Designing Microprocessors and Computer Systems for Emerging Workloads

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in the emergence and popularity of several new information technology related computer applications. The emerging computer workloads involve the integration of a variety of software, protocols, and standards: GUIs, Java, CORBA, cgi, perl, TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML are just a few of them. Facilitating smooth use of the internet for emerging applications involves designing efficient computer systems and microprocessors for use in the computers that serve these applications. Most of these workloads are just emerging, and their behavior is not well-understood by computer designers and architects. Many of the microprocessors that run these applications were designed before the advent of these workloads. The proposed research consists of understanding emerging workloads of the Information Technology era and designing microprocessors and computer systems for their efficient execution. It involves identifying where the cycles are gone during execution of these workloads, and identifying sources of loss of performance. The study will pin point bottlenecks, and identify architectural enhancements to improve performance. The performance monitoring counters present on commercial processors will be used for the first level of characterization followed by detailed complete system simulations for analyzing design tradeoffs. The proposed research will be conducted in close collaboration with our industrial partners, IBM, Tivoli, Intel and AMD. The project will serve as an integral part of a long term, comprehensive research program to influence the design of microprocessors and computer systems for the information technology era.