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Submicron Systems Architecture Project : Semiannual Technical Report
The Mosaic C is an experimental fine-grain multicomputer
based on single-chip nodes. The Mosaic C chip includes 64KB of fast dynamic RAM,
processor, packet interface, ROM for bootstrap and self-test, and a two-dimensional selftimed
router. The chip architecture provides low-overhead and low-latency handling of
message packets, and high memory and network bandwidth. Sixty-four Mosaic chips are
packaged by tape-automated bonding (TAB) in an 8 x 8 array on circuit boards that can, in
turn, be arrayed in two dimensions to build arbitrarily large machines. These 8 x 8 boards are
now in prototype production under a subcontract with Hewlett-Packard. We are planning
to construct a 16K-node Mosaic C system from 256 of these boards. The suite of Mosaic
C hardware also includes host-interface boards and high-speed communication cables. The
hardware developments and activities of the past eight months are described in section 2.1.
The programming system that we are developing for the Mosaic C is based on the
same message-passing, reactive-process, computational model that we have used with earlier
multicomputers, but the model is implemented for the Mosaic in a way that supports finegrain
concurrency. A process executes only in response to receiving a message, and may in
execution send messages, create new processes, and modify its persistent variables before
it either exits or becomes dormant in preparation for receiving another message. These
computations are expressed in an object-oriented programming notation, a derivative of
C++ called C+-. The computational model and the C+- programming notation are
described in section 2.2. The Mosaic C runtime system, which is written in C+-, provides
automatic process placement and highly distributed management of system resources. The
Mosaic C runtime system is described in section 2.3
DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability
The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints
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