CAREER: Holistic Computer Architectures for Nanoscale Processors

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Technology scaling has arguably been the most important contributor to the increase in the computational power in microprocessors and indirectly affects many aspects of modern life. One of the most important challenges facing continued technology scaling is the increasing variability in device characteristics, i.e., process variations. Process variations manifest themselves as fluctuations in performance, power, and reliability of manufactured processors. To mitigate these effects, this CAREER program develops variation-tolerant architectures that utilize ?holistic optimizations?, i.e., this project studies techniques that simultaneously consider various computational abstraction levels. The two intriguing examples of such techniques are the consideration of economical incentives to measure the quality of architectures and optimizing for user-perceived performance to increase lifetime reliability. In addition, this project studies the development of understudy components and modular architectures. Understudy components are structures that can replace parts of the chips that fail, whereas modular architectures are processors built using a small variety of similar structures that can be dynamically allocated. These research tasks have the potential of having a large impact on both academic and industrial research. Process variations cause immense problems to all processor manufacturers and their rising impact should be understood in detail. In addition, there is a growing need to understand how different architectures affect the overall targets of the processor manufacturers as well as the users of these processors. Such an understanding, which will be developed in this project, can then be used to architect much more efficient processors.