Methods and infrastructure in the era of accelerator-centric architectures

Brandon Reagen, Yakun Sophia Shao, Sam Likun Xi, Gu Yeon Wei, David Brooks

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Computer architecture today is anything but business as usual, and what is bad for business is often great for science. As Moore's Law continues to unwaveringly march forward, despite the ceasing of Dennard scaling, continued performance gains with each processor generation has become a significant challenge, and requires creative solutions. Namely, the way to continue to scale performance in light of power issues is through hardware specialization. Hardware accelerators promise not only orders of magnitude in performance improvements over general purpose processors, but sport similar energy efficiency gains. However, accelerators are equal parts problem solver as they are creator. The major problem is designing and integrating accelerators into a complex environment within the stringent SoC design cycles. Given that each accelerator has a rich design space and convoluted implications and interactions with the memory system, better mechanisms for studying this new-breed of SoC are needed. To usher in the new era of computer architecture, we have built Aladdin: a high-level accelerator simulator enabling rapid accelerator design. Aladdin was recently extended to operate in conjunction with gem5 to study memory system interactions. In this paper we will recount the operation and utilities of Aladdin and gem5-Aladdin, concluding with a case study of how Aladdin can be used to optimize DNN accelerators.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2017 IEEE 60th International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, MWSCAS 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages902-905
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781509063895
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 27 2017
Event60th IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, MWSCAS 2017 - Boston, United States
Duration: Aug 6 2017Aug 9 2017

Publication series

NameMidwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems
Volume2017-August
ISSN (Print)1548-3746

Conference

Conference60th IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, MWSCAS 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period8/6/178/9/17

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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