The proposed infrastructure acquisition and development will provide computing resources to enhance the ability of faculty and students in the PI's department to do computationally instensive research projects. A cluster of 32 computers will provide high throughput for tasks arising from compiler and computer architecture research done on in the area of branch prediction. Accurate branch prediction enables a processor to anticipate and respond to future events in order to improve performance while keeping energy consumption due to wrong-path speculation low. The infrastructure will allow the performance and energy of programs running on multicore processors to be measured and enable the modeling of compiler, processor microarchitecture and various branch predictor schemes which can best respond to changes occuring in program execution.
