Technology limitations, emerging applications, and changing usability trends are ushering in a new era in multi-core computer systems. A key problem for both application and microprocessor design is that applications are largely evolving independently from the architectural development of microprocessors. This is a problem for architectural research because developing efficient architectural solutions requires realistic characterization of the next generation applications. From a system design perspective, understanding application behavior is crucial for building an efficient system, since they must be optimized to exploit mechanisms provided in the architecture. This proposal seeks to re-think next generation multi-core systems - both software and hardware architectures using state-of-the-art quantitative design tools.
The two key ideas explored in this research are the following. First, is a hybrid task-level/data-level parallelism execution model for emerging applications that have abundant but not synchronization-free parallelism. Second, is the development of new highly accurate and efficient quantitative models to evaluate architecture and application design alternatives, at scale and over a wide range of application workloads. The project seeks to provide a suite of quantitative tools to close the development loop of design, evaluation and analysis of software's behavior on hardware, allowing the tuning of both software and hardware. This project takes real-time graphics as a challenge application and derives a full system, called Copernicus, for future real-time graphics that can provide significantly higher image qualities. The project will also integrate these quantitative models in the curriculum and disseminate to the research community.
The innovations proposed in this research have the potential for significantly aiding microprocessor and application development for future systems. The development of a full system specification for ray-tracing can trigger an inflection in the evolution of both programmable processors and specialized graphics processors.
