CS 8535: Advanced Computer Architecture: Dark Silicon

Instructors: Kevin Skadron and Brett Meyer
Class meetings: T-Th 12:30-1:45

Prerequisite: CS 6354 or equivalent
This course will count toward breadth under the "Computer Systems" area for CS students and under Area I, "Hardware" for CPE students.

The topic of this year's advanced computer architecture course is the notion of potential "dark silicon" - the concern that we won't be able to use all the cores or units on a chip simultaneously due to power limits.  We'll look at why (including power delivery, thermal, and I/O bandwidth limits) and some of the implications: idle cores, throttling, accelerators, novel memory hierarchies, 3D architectures, reliability, etc. The course will be a mix of lectures and student-led paper discussions, with a course project.

Microprocessor Survey

(An overview of several contemporary processors and MPSoCs of interest, with slides)

• Intel Atom - Jonathan Dorn and Michelle McDaniel
• NVIDIA Tegra2 - Liang Wang and Runjie Zhang
• ARM Cortex - Tanima Dey and Wei Wang
• TI OMAP4 - Avinash Kalyanaraman and Abhishek Rawat
• Freescale i.MX family - Shuai Che
• RAW/Tilera - Robbie Hott and Jason Mars

Readings and Topics

• 1/25: Venkateshet al., Conservation Cores, ASPLOS'10, led by Wei Wang
• 1/27: Najaf-abadi et al., Core Selectability, PACT'09, led by Abhishek Rawat
• 2/1: Hameed et al., Inefficiency in General-Purpose, ISCA'10, led by Lukasz Szafaryn
• 2/3: Chung et al., Single-Chip Heterogeneous Computing, MICRO'10, led by Jason Mars
• 2/8: Tutorial: GPU architecture, presented by Michael Boyer
• 2/10, 2/15: Tutorial: Power-aware design, presented by Kevin Skadron
• 2/17: Tutorial: NoC, presented by Brett Meyer
• 2/22: Tutorial: Temperature-aware design, presented by Kevin Skadron
• 2/24: Huang et al., Scaling Constraints (manuscript), led by Vidyabhushan Mohan
• 3/1: Tutorial: Reliability part 1, presented by Brett Meyer
• 3/3: Processor presentations, part 1
• 3/8, 3/10: Spring break
• 3/15: Processor presentations, part 2
• 3/17: Project overviews
• 3/22: Li et al., McPAT, MICRO'09, led by Tanima Dey
• 3/24: Tutorial: Reliability part 2, presented by Brett Meyer
• 3/29: Gupta et al., StageNet, IEEE Trans. Computers, Jan. 2011, led by Robbie Hott
• 3/31: Project proposals
• 4/5: Udipi et al., "Rethinking DRAM", ISCA'10, led by Shuai Che
• 4/7: Tutorial: ASIC and sub-threshold design, presented by Ben Calhoun
• 4/12: Tutorial: FPGAs and near/sub-threshold design, presented by Joe Ryan
• 4/14: Dreslinski et al., "An Energy Efficient Parallel Architecture Using Near Threshold Operation," PACT'07, led by Runjie Zhang
• 4/19: Krimer et al., "Synctium: a Near-Threshold Stream Processor for Energy-Constrained Parallel Applications," IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, led by Avinash Kalyanaraman
• 4/21: Mishra et al., "Tartan: evaluating spatial computation for whole program execution," ASPLOS'06, led by Michelle McDaniel
• 4/26: Watkins and Albonesi, "ReMAP: A Reconfigurable Heterogeneous Multicore Architecture," MICRO'10, led by Jonathan Dorn
• 4/28: Tutorial: Non-volatile memories, presented by Sudhanva Gurumurthi
• 5/3-5/4: Project presentations

Last updated: 21 Apr. 2011