Seminar

The power wall has resulted in a sharp turn in processor designs, and they irrevocably went multi-？core. Multi-？cores are good because they promise higher potential throughput (and never mind the actual performance of your applications). This is because the cores can be made simpler and run at lower voltage resultingin much more power-？efficient operation. Even though the performance of single–core is much reduced, the total possible throughput of the system scales with the number of cores. However, the excitement of multi-？core architectures will only last so long. This is not only because the benefits of voltage scaling will reduce with decreasing voltage, but also because after some point, making a core simpler will only be detrimental and may actually increase power-？efficiency. What next! How do we further improve power-？efficiency?

Beyond the hill of multi-？cores, lies the valley of accelerators. Accelerators: hardware accelerators (e.g., Intel SSE), software accelerators (e.g., VLIW accelerators), reconfigurable accelerators (e.g., FPGAs), programmable accelerators (CGRAs) are some of the foreseeable solutions that can further improve power-？efficiency of computation. Among these, we find CGRAs, or Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Arrays a very promising technology. They are slightly reconfigurable (and therefore close to hardware), but are programmable (therefore usable as more general-？purpose accelerators). As a result, they can provide power-？efficiencies of up to
100 GOps/W, while being relatively general purpose. Although very promising, several challenges remain in compilation for CGRAs, especially because they have very little dynamism in the architecture, and almost everything (including control) is statically determined. In this talk, I will talk about our recent research in developing compiler technology to enable CGRAs as general-？purpose accelerators.