CRI: IAD Keeping Pace with Growing Computing Needs: A Strategy for Enhancing Multi-Core Microprocessor Research and Education at Cornell University

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

0708788 CRI: IAD Keeping Pace with Growing Computing Needs: A Strategy for Enhancing Multi-Core Microprocessor Research and Education at Cornell University David Albonesi Due to a number of factors, the computing requirements for even a modest-size academic research group in computer architecture have risen dramatically in recent years. In order to keep pace with the rapidly growing research and educational needs, the research group at Cornell has adopted a cost-effective approach to building compute clusters for the laboratory. An opportunity exists to roughly double the present computing resources at modest cost which will have a profound impact on the research and educational activities. The computing infrastructure will greatly enhance the research capabilities in multi-core computer architecture. This research effort is on improving multi-core reliability and power-performance efficiency, and in the efficient exploration of multi-core design spaces. The additional computing capabilities enabled by this grant will permit the researchers to more comprehensively address these areas, but also to exploit the synergy among these activities. As one example, the additional computing capability will permit an understanding of the combined performance, power, and reliability tradeoffs in future multi-core microarchitectures through the use of predictive modeling. The research enabled by the new infrastructure will directly address several critical design challenges of future multi-core microprocessors, and thus will have high relevance to U.S. microprocessor manufacturers.