Advanced Topics in Computer Architecture

报告题目：Advanced Topics in Computer Architecture

报告人：Per Stenström, 教授, ACM/IEEE Fellow, 瑞典皇家工程科学院院士（the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences）、欧洲人文和科学院院士（Academia Europaea）、西班牙皇家工程院院士（the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering）, 瑞典查尔姆斯理工大学（Chalmers University of Technology, SWEDEN）

报告时间：10月08-10,13-14日，9:00-12:00

报告地点：新主楼F座327

内容简介：

As we move forward, the architecture of choice will consist of an increasing number of processing cores encompassing general ones as well as specialized. Main concerns for such heterogeneous multi/many-core architectures are to exhibit high performance within the constraints of the power being consumed. Key to this is to offer a productive interface to the software by offering primitives that can reduce the effort in writing parallel programs. To this end, the design of the memory system plays a key role.

In this course on Advanced Topics in Computer Architecture, the focus is on design issues related to on-chip memory hierarchies for heterogeneous multi/many-core systems and covers the following topics to improve power consumption and programmability.

Programmability enhancing techniques

Topics:

• Cache coherence and memory consistency
• Thread-level speculation techniques
• Transactional memory
• Run-time guided cache management

We lay the foundation for a family of techniques to enhance programmability by establishing the key notions of cache coherence and memory consistency. Armed with this, we review a number of approaches to enhance programmability. Thread-level speculation aims at unlocking parallelism by speculatively running sequential pieces of the program in parallel. The second family of techniques is transactional memory that offers primitives to the application interface that allows program pieces to execute atomically. Apart from reviewing different approaches to build such abstractions, we will also review applications of it. Finally, we will review some ongoing research efforts that explore how state-of-the-art task-based programming models can off-load the programmer from resource management by tightly integrating the run-time system with the architecture.

Power/energy saving cache/memory techniques:

Topics:

• Value locality and its opportunities
• Value-aware caches
• Cache compression techniques
• Memory compression techniques

All these techniques leverage the observation that some values stored in memory are more prevalent than other. They seek to exploit that by storing and retrieving data more efficiently so as to use cache and memory resources more efficiently. We will see how this opens up for more effective memory hierarchies.

Value-aware caches store frequent values compactly to use cache resources more efficiently. Compression is the more general approach to track value locality in caches and memory. We go through a number of compression approaches and the specific issues that must be dealt with to allow for effectively applying them to cache and to memory.

教授简介：

Per Stenström earned his PhD degree in computer engineering in 1990 from Lund University, Sweden. Since 1995 he is a Professor of Computer Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research interests are devoted to high-performance computer architecture and he has made major contributions to especially high-performance memory systems. He has authored or co-authored three textbooks and more than 130 publications in international journals and conferences and around ten patents. He is regularly serving program committees of major conferences in the computer architecture field and is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and a Senior Editor of ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. He has been an editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Processing, the IEEE TCCA Computer Architecture Letters, and others. He co-founded the HiPEAC Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission. He has also acted as General and Program Chair for a large number of conferences including the ACM/IEEE Int. Symposium on Computer Architecture, the IEEE High-Performance Computer Architecture Symposium, the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium and the ACM International Supercomputing Conference. He is a member of the ACM Europe Council, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and a member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.

Per Stenström 1990年毕业于瑞典隆德大学，获得计算机工程博士学位。1995年至今，担任瑞典查尔姆斯理工大学计算机工程系教授。他的研究兴趣聚焦于高性能计算机体系结构，尤其在高性能内存系统方面贡献卓著。他出版了3部教科书，在重要国际期刊和会议上发表超过130篇学术论文，拥有10余项专利。他是多个计算机系统结构领域重要国际会议的程序委员会成员，并行和分布式期刊（JPDC）副主编、ACM体系结构和代码优化学报（TACO）高级主编、IEEE 计算机学报（ToC）、IEEE 并行和分布式处理学报（TPDP）以及IEEE 计算机系统结构快报（TCL）等高水平期刊编委，曾经担任ISCA、HPCA、IPDPS、ISC等重要国际会议的大会主席或程序委员会主席。他是ACM 和IEEE Fellow，瑞典皇家工程科学院院士、欧洲人文和科学院院士、西班牙皇家工程院院士。

编辑：廖 行