CAREER: Combating Dark Silicon through Specialization: Communication-Aware Tiled Many-Accelerator Architectures

Tufts University, Medford MA

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers have predicted that, in the coming years, the computer industry?s steady gains in computing performance will slow and even cease all together because of a condition known as Dark Silicon. Dark Silicon is the result of an increase in power density that will make it necessary to leave sections of a microchip powered off. The consequences of Dark Silicon could be widespread, limiting the increasing benefits all aspects of society---from medicine, commerce to entertainment----have reaped from advances in computing. One solution is specialization. With the advent of high-level synthesis tools capable of generating circuits from high-level programming languages such as C, it is now possible to realize specialized accelerators for any application with 10-100x the efficiency of general purpose microprocessors. The computing industry needs new architecture paradigms to organize thousands of these accelerators. This project envisions the computing platform of the future as comprised of domain specific tiles, each with 10-100 specialized accelerators. The research team will advance this vision with innovations in two aspects. First, by inventing a new memory-interconnect subsystem capable of keeping these specialized cores fed with data. Second, canonical tiles will be invented for different application domains that can be studied by the wider research community. The team will study memory-interconnect systems for tiles in a manner that recognizes the unique features of many-accelerator architectures: intermittent usage of accelerators, bursts of communication, and the need to share memory between specialized cores. While designing tiles of many-accelerators, the team will develop a new description language that describes the computation and communication capabilities of a tile and matches them with a graph representation of the workload. To provide broader impact, the tools, canonical designs, and models developed by this project will be made available to the wider research community to enable the study and eventual commercialization of specialized architectures. As increasing the technological literacy of the general public is essential to cultivating responsible behavior, the integrated educational plan focuses on all age groups: it reaches K-12 students through workshops and presentations; undergraduate and graduate students through research opportunities and course offerings; and the greater Philadelphia community.