Conservation Cores: Architectures for a Future of Dark Silicon
Speaker: John (Jack) Sampson , University of California, San Diego
Date: March 22 2012
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: 32-G449
Host: Anant Agarwal and Li-Shiuan Peh, CSAIL
Contact: Francis Doughty, 253-4602, doughty@mit.edu
Constraints on power and cooling now limit our ability to benefit from
continued Moore's Law growth in available transistors. We now face a
Utilization Wall: For a given power and area budget, an exponentially
decreasing fraction of the available transistors can be simultaneously
switched at full frequency. This, in turn, has given rise to the
phenomenon of dark silicon: a growing fraction of chip area that must
remain idle for the chip to stay within its power budget. My recent
work has focused on a class of automatically-generated energy-reducing
coprocessors, called conservation cores (C-Cores), as a means of
surmounting the Utilization Wall's most pressing challenges. We have
constructed C-Cores that improve energy-delay product by more than 10x
over an efficient, in-order core, and we are building a prototype
mobile application processor, GreenDroid, that uses C-Cores to reduce
smartphone energy consumption. In this talk, I will discuss the
origins and implications of the rise of dark silicon, and show how we
can design new, aggressively heterogeneous architectures to manage and
exploit dark silicon's growth.
Bio:
John (Jack) Sampson is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of
California, San Diego. His research interests include
energy-efficient processor design, hardware specialization, and
on-chip memory systems. He is part of the GreenDroid group, which is
building a prototype mobile application processor using
conservation core techniques. His current research focuses on novel
heterogeneous architectures for managing and exploiting the growth of
dark silicon. He received his PhD in Computer Science (Computer
Engineering) from UC San Diego in 2010 and his BS in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2002. He is one
of the organizers for DaSi, the Dark Silicon Workshop.
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