Future Microprocessors Driven by Dataflow Principles

Architects and the semiconductor industry as a whole is faced with a unique challenge of improving performance and reducing power consumption of future microprocessors with almost no gain coming from device scaling. The role of architecture is perhaps more important today than it has ever been. Industry has reacted with a short-term goal of domain or application-specific accelerators which do little to improve performance of “general-purpose” applications, suffer from programming challenges, are by design obsoletion-prone, and introduce severe design pressure in maintaining so many designs. Is there a principled way to build future processors that can avoid this trap of adhoc integration?

In this talk, I will describe how the underlying principles of explicit dataflow based computation can be applied to both the design of cores and accelerators. Specifically I will highlight a simple observation: a hybrid execution model that allows both sequential and dataflow based execution can be extremely beneficial. When applied to the design of cores, I will show such a hybrid model can increase performance of the state-of-art high performance processors by more than a factor of two while reducing power consumption. Applying these same principles to the design of accelerators, shows we can build a single programmable accelerator that can match the efficiency and performance of “any” domain-specific accelerator.

Speaker Details

Karu Sankaralingam is an associate professor in the computer sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also leads the Vertical Research Group (opens in new tab). His research interests include open source hardware, architecture, and compilers. He is a recipient of the IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architecture Award in 2012, an NSF CAREER award in 2009, the Emil H Steiger Distinguished Teaching award in 2014, and the Letters and Science Philip R. Certain – Gary Sandefur Distinguished Faculty Award in 2013 which recognizes outstanding teaching by a member of the College of The Letters and Science. He is currently leading the design of an open source GPU called MIAOW. During his PhD he helped build the TRIPS chip.

Date:
Speakers:
Karu Sankaralingam
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks