Descripción del proyecto
Ampliación del protocolo de coherencia para optimizar la eficiencia energética de los procesadores multinúcleo
Los procesadores multinúcleo de dispositivos digitales, como teléfonos inteligentes y servidores de altas prestaciones, requieren una mayor potencia de cálculo para acceder a aplicaciones de nueva aparición. Con todo, su rendimiento puede verse limitado notablemente por las técnicas de ejecución especulativa en el «hardware» que, a menudo, llevan a cabo operaciones innecesarias que aumentan bastante el consumo de energía. Por lo tanto, es esencial diseñar procesadores multinúcleo con una mayor eficiencia energética. El objetivo del proyecto financiado con fondos europeos ECHO es mejorar el rendimiento y la eficiencia de los procesadores multinúcleo del futuro al mejorar la función del protocolo de coherencia de caché. Al añadir extensiones sencillas al protocolo de coherencia de caché, se podrá reducir las especulaciones erróneas en el núcleo de procesamiento y favorecer la optimización especulativa durante la compilación.
Objetivo
Multicore processors are present nowadays in most digital devices, from smartphones to high-performance
servers. The increasing computational power of these processors is essential for enabling many important
emerging application domains such as big-data, media, medical, or scientific modeling. A fundamental
technique to improve performance is speculation, a technique that consists in executing work before it is
known if it is actually needed. In hardware, speculation significantly increases energy consumption by
performing unnecessary operations, while speculation in software (e.g. compilers) is not the default thus
preventing performance optimizations. Since performance in current multicores is limited by their power
budget, it is imperative to make multicores as energy-efficient as possible to increase performance even
further.
In a multicore architecture, the cache coherence protocol is an essential component since its unique but
challenging role is to offer a simple and unified view of the memory hierarchy. This project envisions that
extending the role of the coherence protocol to simplify other system components will be the key to
overcome the performance and energy limitations of current multicores. In particular, ECHO proposes to
add simple but effective extensions to the cache coherence protocol in order to (i) reduce and even
eliminate misspeculations at the processing cores and synchronization mechanisms and to (ii) enable
speculative optimizations at compile time. The goal of this innovative approach is to improve the
performance and energy efficiency of future multicore architectures. To accomplish the objectives
proposed in this project, I will build on my 14 years expertise in cache coherence, documented in over 40
publications of high impact.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
30003 Murcia
España