Computer Architecture and Systems Laboratory

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Heterogenous Virtual Machines

The relentless progress of Moore's Law has periodically inspired major innovations -- in hardware and software -- to keep performance growth on pace with transistor density. Current trends have led to the development chip-scale and rack-scale of heterogeneous many-core platforms -- large scale, heterogeneous systems comprised of homogeneous general purpose cores intermingled with customized heterogeneous cores and using diverse memory and cache hierarchies. These systems have had a disruptive impact on the software infrastructure and present numerous architecture and system challenges. Our efforts are guided by the following themes.

CASL efforts are part of a larger CERCS project: Heterogeneous Virtual Machines that broadly develops and extends virtualization technologies for effective deployment and sharing of accelerators. Our approach is based on a pooled accelerator execution model where a user describes a HVM platform as an aggregation of homogenous and heterogeneous cores. Within CASL we are developing the Harmony run-time for bridging programming languages/abstractions and such platforms for high productivity application development. Harmony is initially targeted for non-virtualized environments for subsequent independent integration into the broader HVM infrastructure. In addition we are studying customized accelerators that can be effectively shared in medium and large scale systems such as eXtensible Architectures for Parallel Instruction Computing (xAPIC)


Sponsor: NVIDIA, Intel, IBM.

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