Erasing Core Boundaries for Robust and Configurable Performance

  • Authors:
  • Shantanu Gupta;Shuguang Feng;Amin Ansari;Scott Mahlke

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • MICRO '43 Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Single-thread performance, reliability and power efficiency are critical design challenges of future multicore systems. Although point solutions have been proposed to address these issues, a more fundamental change to the fabric of multicore systems is necessary to seamlessly combat these challenges. Towards this end, this paper proposes Core Genesis, a dynamically adaptive multiprocessor fabric that blurs out individual core boundaries, and encourages resource sharing across cores for performance, fault tolerance and customized processing. Further, as a manifestation of this vision, the paper provides details of a unified performance-reliability solution that can assemble variable-width processors from a network of potentially broken) pipeline stage-level resources. This design relies on interconnection flexibility, micro architectural innovations, and compiler directed instruction steering, to merge pipeline resources for high single-thread performance. The same flexibility enables it to route around broken components, achieving sub-core level defect isolation. Together, the resulting fabric consists of a pool of pipeline stage-level resources that can be fluidly allocated for accelerating single-thread performance, throughput computing, or tolerating failures.