Runtime-Aware Architectures

• Published in: Euro-Par 2015: Parallel Processing pp. 16 - 27
• Main Authors: Casas, Marc, Moreto, Miquel, Alvarez, Lluc, Castillo, Emilio, Chasapis, Dimitrios, Hayes, Timothy, Jaulmes, Luc, Palomar, Oscar, Unsal, Osman, Cristal, Adrian, Ayguade, Eduard, Labarta, Jesus, Valero, Mateo
• Format: Book Chapter Publication
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2015; Springer
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Arquitectura de computadors; Arquitectures paral·leles; Direct Memory Access; Informàtica; Instruction Level Parallelism; Memory Hierarchy; Multiprocessadors; Multiprocessing systems; Multiprocessors; Parallel architectures; Parallel programming; Parallel programming (Computer science); Programació en paral·lel (Informàtica); Runtime System; Very Long Instruction Word; Àrees temàtiques de la UPC
• ISBN: 9783662480953; 3662480956; 3662480964; 9783662480960
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-48096-0_2

In the last few years, the traditional ways to keep the increase of hardware performance to the rate predicted by the Moore’s Law have vanished. When uni-cores were the norm, hardware design was decoupled from the software stack thanks to a well defined Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). This simple interface allowed developing applications without worrying too much about the underlying hardware, while hardware designers were able to aggressively exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP) in superscalar processors. Current multi-cores are designed as simple symmetric multiprocessors (SMP) on a chip. However, we believe that this is not enough to overcome all the problems that multi-cores face. The runtime system of the parallel programming model has to drive the design of future multi-cores to overcome the restrictions in terms of power, memory, programmability and resilience that multi-cores have. In the paper, we introduce an approach towards a Runtime-Aware Architecture (RAA), a massively parallel architecture designed from the runtime’s perspective.