Future computer architectures will execute critical applications ranging from climate modeling to bioinformatics to simulations of new materials. Emerging chip multiprocessors are novel architectures that provide high performance and low power consumption. When multiple applications share the same chip multiprocessor, proper management of architectural resources becomes a critical problem. This research targets inter-application management of different types of resources found in a chip multiprocessor using robust and resilient techniques drawn from formal feedback control theory. It enables applications to satisfy their performance requirements and, at the same time, maximizes the utilization of hardware resources.
This research helps to make the transition from conventional architectures to chip multiprocessors smoother, and as a result, maximizes the number of critical applications that can take advantage of these emerging architectures. The transfer of the technology being developed to IBM and HP Labs allows serious testing of the proposed strategies in large-scale architectures built from chip multiprocessors. The results from this project not only present an accurate assessment of feedback control theory in a new domain, but also get integrated into two important software infrastructures, Singularity and Xen, both used extensively by large research communities. This research also accommodates two efforts in broadening participation, CISE Visit in Engineering Weekends (VIEW) and NASA-Aerospace Education Services Project (NASA-AESP) at the Center for Science and the Schools (CSATS).
