Evolve : a preliminary multicore architecture for Introspective Computing

This thesis creates a framework for Introspective Computing. Introspective Computing is a computing paradigm characterized by self-aware software. Self-aware software systems use hardware mechanisms to observe an application's execution so that they may adapt execution to improve performance, reduce power consumption, or balance user-defined fitness criteria over time-varying conditions in a system environment. We dub our framework Partner Cores. The Partner Cores framework builds upon tiled multicore architectures [11, 10, 25, 9], closely coupling cores such that one may be used to observe and optimize execution in another. Partner cores incrementally collect and analyze execution traces from code cores then exploit knowledge of the hardware to optimize execution. This thesis develops a tiled architecture for the Partner Cores framework that we dub Evolve. Evolve provides a versatile substrate upon which software may coordinate core partnerships and various forms of parallelism. To do so, Evolve augments a basic tiled architecture with introspection hardware and programmable functional units. Partner Cores software systems on the Evolve hardware may follow the style of helper threading [13, 12, 6] or utilize the programmable functional units in each core to evolve application-specific coprocessor engines. This thesis work develops two Partner Cores software systems: the Dynamic Partner-Assisted Branch Predictor and the Introspective L2 Memory System (IL2). The branch predictor employs a partner core as a coprocessor engine for general dynamic branch prediction in a corresponding code core. The IL2 retasks the silicon resources of partner cores as banks of an on-chip, distributed, software L2 cache for code cores.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Eastep, Jonathan M. (Jonathan Michael)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Anant Agarwal.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40324

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40324