Programmable Architectures for Communication Systems

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Programmable Architectures for Communication
Systems
D. K. Arvind Institute for Computing Systems
Architecture, Division of Informatics, The
University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh
EH9 3JZ, Scotland. Email dka_at_dcs.ed.ac.uk
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Edinburgh - The Capital City
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Overview

• University of Edinburgh
• Division of Informatics
• Edinburgh InfoLab
• Research
• Collaboration

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University of Edinburgh

• Founded in 1583
• Student Population - 18,023
• Undergraduate - 15,350 Postgraduate - 2,673
• Staff - 6,649
• Academic Staff - 3,312

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Informatics is the study of the structure,
behaviour, and interactions of both natural and
artificial computational systems.(http//www.inf
ormatics.ed.ac.uk/)
Division of Informatics

• Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation
• Centre for Intelligent Systems and their
  Applications
• Institute for Communicating and Collaborative
  Systems
• Institute for Perception, Action and Behaviour
• Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science
• Institute for Computing Systems Architecture

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Division of Informatics

• Informatics_at_Edinburgh enjoys an international
  reputation for both its teaching and research
• Only department in the UK awarded the top 5A
  research rating in Computer Science in Dec. 2001
• UKs biggest department with 87 research-active
  staff and 165 PhD students
• Edinburgh-Stanford strategic research partnership
• Location of the National e-Science Centre
• Awarded top Excellent rating in the Teaching
  Quality Assessment

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The Future .

• Proliferation of Peer-to-Peer computing
• fundamental force of change and restructuring
• Examples
• Cybiko - P2P wireless networked games
• Napster - P2P sharing of music
• Freenet - P2P information store
• DoCoMo P2P communication
• Unregulated communications channels
• ISM, UWB, free-space optics, ..
• System-on-Chip components
• banalisation of silicon technology
• Silicon falling behind
• storage bandwidth improving at a greater rate

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P2P systems - Challenges

• Portability - Java, .NET
• Performance - exploit concurrency
• Mobility - size and energy consumption
• Flexibility - soft- and hard-programmability

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Research Focus

• To explore novel architectures for P2P systems
  using banalised technology, and enlighten future
  development of disruptive products and business
  change
• Our research is seeking programmable solutions
  which
• harness progress in (a) technology (b) theory
• implement high-performance algorithms and
  applications efficiently

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Disruptive technology opportunities

• System Architectures to explore
• Personal switch/P2P processor
• Hubless, ephemeral, transient networks
• Info-torch/Info-Klieg light
• P2Pn libraryphonegaming

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Trends in the silicon fabric

• Convergence of transduction, communication and
  computation - heterogeneous systems with sensors
  and actuators
• High performance computation at modest power
  consumption
• Pre-designed IP blocks with different timing
  characteristics
• The dominance of programmable fabrics - both
  soft- and hard-programmable
• The complexity of the designs will demand novel
  architectures and design styles

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The Die Area reachable in 1 clock cycle (1.2 GHz)
At 0.1um (1 Billion transistors) only 16 of the
chip is reachable in 1 clock cycle Dominance of
interconnect delays over computational
ones Network of Temporal Regions
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Micronets - An alternative vision of Systems
Architecture
Micronet or Network-on-Chip a network of
entities which operate concurrently and
communicate asynchronously Fractal model of
system design network of sub-systems, down to
network of transistors Control is layered and
distributed locally - behaviour can be decomposed
to run on architectural clusters with the optimal
mix of computational elements A clean separation
between computation and communication, and,
behaviour and timing - leads to a compositional
design style
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Behaviour-Architecture Co-design

• Integration Platforms composed of networks
  (micronets) of heterogeneous computational
  entities that operate in a multi-threaded
  fashion.
• Applications composed of software blocks some
  pre-defined, such as communication protocols
  others, more specific to the application.
• Co-design (Step 1) recognise concurrent
  operations and optimise communication at
  different levels of granularity in the
  application and map them to the platform
• Co-design (Step 2) explore the trade-off
  between programmability (both soft- and hard-),
  and performance (MOPS/mWatt) of the application
  running on the platform

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The COMPASS Design Environment

• Visualisation of energy and performance effects
  of compiler optimisations
• Distributed simulation platform on a 16-node
  Beowulf cluster

• Java or C applications
• SSA intermediate representation
• Soft- and Hard-programmability

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Design framework for programmable multi-threaded
systems
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A micronet-based multi-threaded architecture
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Automatic Synthesis of Micronet Architecture from
Specification

• void
• Micronet(chan tinst Inst, chan tpc Pc, chan
  tregval RegDump, chan Word MemDump)
• //Define channels
• chan tinst ALUinst, MUinst
• chan tpc ALUpc
• chan tack ALUCUack, MUCUack
• chan tregreq RegRequest
• chan tregreturn Xout, Yout
• chan tregval ALUXin, ALUYin, MUXin, MUYin
• chan twriteback toReg, ALUWBout, MUWBout
• chan bool KillBus
• //Spawn linked Functional Units in Parallel
• // clock 32
• par
• //Buffers for register requests
• // clock 32
• ControlUnit(Inst, Pc,
• ALUinst, MUinst,

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Power/Speed estimations on the M/T architecture
TPU 1
TPU 0
Overall
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Power - Speed Tradeoff for Programs executing on
Micronet Architectures
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Example of an Internet Appliance

• Bluetooth-based system in VCC
• Two physical objects the WAPmobile, and a WAP
  phone
• The behaviour of an internet- and
  Bluetooth-enabled Basestation, and a
  Bluetooth-enabled robot is simulated in VCC
• The WAP phone controls the robot in real-time
  via the VCC behavioural models

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Proven Research Expertise in Systems Architecture

• Programmable Architecture Design
• Micronet-based asynchronous architectures
• Java and C compilation for multi-threaded
  embedded systems
• Applications include Bluetooth- and 802.11-based
  ones
• Vertically-integrated environment (COMPASS) for
  energy-conscious, high-performance embedded
  system design
• Industrial research partners
• Well-endowed laboratory, including a 16-node
  Beowulf cluster for simulations and
  state-of-the-art EDA tools

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Model for Collaboration

• Feature set
• Beyond the envelope research
• Pre-competitive several industrial partners
• industrial support funding, equipment, body
  swap,.
• Successful Examples
• Silicon Structures (Caltech 1977 - 81)
• Berkeley Wireless Research Center (1998 - )
• MIT Media Lab (1987 - )

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Road Map

• Creation of the Edinburgh InfoLab to research
  architectures for future P2P systems
• 5 founding industrial partners/subscribers
• 30 PhD students in the steady state
• Partners contributions Two 4-year PhD
  studentships per year, cumulatively for 3 years
• Interested? Email dka_at_dcs.ed.ac.uk
• More details at http//www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/dka

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Thank You