Counterflow Pipelines are a novel pipeline organization proposed by Sproull, Sutherland, and Molnar a few years ago. CFP's have several good characteristics, including: local control, a simple and mostly regular structure, highly composable components, and inherent handling of a type of register renaming, speculative execution, and out-of-order execution.
My research studies how to build counterflow pipelines tailored to the resource and data flow requirements of inner computation-intensive loops. I have demonstrated that counterflow pipelines can be used as a target organization for the automatic design of application-specific processors. This work shows that simple computing structures (the CFP) can be used to build custom architectures that have performance competitive with modern aggressive superscalar and VLIW architectures without their design cost. Furthermore, my work presents a framework for adding application-specific functional devices (e.g., a MAC unit or video codec) to a custom processor at a very low design cost.
Bruce Childers
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
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brc2m@cs.virginia.edu