Customizing the Computational Capabilities of Processors

  • Nate Clark | University of Michigan

Consumers will always demand more performance from their computer systems. Real-time ray tracing and speech recognition are just two of the many compelling applications that remain outside of the computational capabilities of current computers. Recently, however, the traditional method of attaining performance through higher processor clock frequencies has driven power consumption to a point where it is too expensive to cool the processors. This trend, known as The Power Wall, has led to a focus on computational efficiency (getting the most work out of each joule) as a key metric in computer system designs.

This talk will describe some of my work on making computation more efficient in processors. First, I will present the design of a novel accelerator specifically targeted to execute the most common acyclic computation patterns from a wide range of applications. Next, I will describe a virtualization technique to make integrating the accelerator into computer systems as cost-effective as possible. Finally, I will demonstrate how the accelerator design and virtualization ideas generalize to a much broader set of accelerators, and discuss some preliminary results and future directions in this area.

Speaker Details

Nate Clark is currently a member of the Compilers Creating Custom Processors research group at the University of Michigan, where he has received his B.S.E., M.S.E., and will shortly receive his Ph.D. Nate’s research interests broadly lie in computer architecture and compilers; more specifically targeted at customizing computer architectures for particular application domains, and the compilation/virtualization challenges that inevitably arise from such customization. His dissertation work has led to twelve publications, five patent filings, and a few industry prototypes that might show up in your cell phone one day. Nate is also one of the primary developers of Trimaran, a research compiler used by more than 50 universities worldwide.

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