Design of future high-performance chips is hindered by severe temperature challenges. For example, existing cooling mechanisms cannot efficiently cool the extremely high power densities that are expected in exascale systems. Emerging cooling technologies, which may address these temperature challenges, are not easily accessible for experimentation to computer engineers. In fact, there is a substantial lag before a cooling technology becomes available for system design and optimization. Such lags cause design quality to be left on the table. To this end, this project proposes a software infrastructure that enables accurate modeling of cutting-edge cooling methods and that facilitates mutually customizing the computing and cooling systems to dramatically push system energy efficiency.
The proposed infrastructure is a system-level design automation tool that includes compact thermal models of emerging cooling methods (thermoelectric coolers, two-phase cooling with microchannels or nanopores, phase-change materials, and single-phase liquid cooling). The project plan includes (1) synthesizing novel device-level models into compact representations; (2) using measurements on prototypes for validation of the proposed models; and (3) developing automation tooling to co-design hybrid customized cooling subsystems together with a given computing system. The broader impact of the project will be to help advance computing beyond the limitations of Moore's Law by making efficient design of high-power-density systems possible. The proposed infrastructure will enable transformative research in design automation, computer architecture, and system design with emerging cooling technologies, particularly in the dimensions of performance, variability, energy, heterogeneity, and cross-layer design. The infrastructure will be released to the community as open source software. The interdisciplinary nature of the project creates ample opportunities for undergraduate projects and outreach programs for underrepresented groups and K-12 students.
