3,987 research outputs found
Computing with Spintronics: Circuits and architectures
This thesis makes the following contributions towards the design of computing platforms with spintronic devices. 1) It explores the use of spintronic memories in the design of a domain-specific processor for an emerging class of data-intensive applications, namely recognition, mining and synthesis (RMS). Two different spintronic memory technologies — Domain Wall Memory (DWM) and STT-MRAM — are utilized to realize the different levels in the memory hierarchy of the domain-specific processor, based on their respective access characteristics. Architectural tradeoffs created by the use of spintronic memories are analyzed. The proposed design achieves 1.5X-4X improvements in energy-delay product compared to a CMOS baseline. 2) It describes the first attempt to use DWM in the cache hierarchy of general-purpose processors. DWM promises unparalleled density by packing several bits of data into each bit-cell. TapeCache, the proposed DWM-based cache architecture, utilizes suitable circuit and architectural optimizations to address two key challenges (i) the high energy and latency requirement of write operations and (ii) the need for shift operations to access the data stored in each DWM bit-cell. At the circuit level, DWM bit-cells that are tailored to the distinct design requirements of different levels in the cache hierarchy are proposed. At the architecture level, TapeCache proposes suitable cache organization and management policies to alleviate the performance impact of shift operations required to access data stored in DWM bit-cells. TapeCache achieves more than 7X improvements in both cache area and energy with virtually identical performance compared to an SRAM-based cache hierarchy. 3) It investigates the design of the on-chip memory hierarchy of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs)—massively parallel processors that are optimized for data-intensive high-throughput workloads—using DWM. STAG, a high density, energy-efficient Spintronic- Tape Architecture for GPGPU cache hierarchies is described. STAG utilizes different DWM bit-cells to realize different memory arrays in the GPGPU cache hierarchy. To address the challenge of high access latencies due to shifts, STAG predicts upcoming cache accesses by leveraging unique characteristics of GPGPU architectures and workloads, and prefetches data that are both likely to be accessed and require large numbers of shift operations. STAG achieves 3.3X energy reduction and 12.1% performance improvement over CMOS SRAM under iso-area conditions. 4) While the potential of spintronic devices for memories is widely recognized, their utility in realizing logic is much less clear. The thesis presents Spintastic, a new paradigm that utilizes Stochastic Computing (SC) to realize spintronic logic. In SC, data is encoded in the form of pseudo-random bitstreams, such that the probability of a \u271\u27 in a bitstream corresponds to the numerical value that it represents. SC can enable compact, low-complexity logic implementations of various arithmetic functions. Spintastic establishes the synergy between stochastic computing and spin-based logic by demonstrating that they mutually alleviate each other\u27s limitations. On the one hand, various building blocks of SC, which incur significant overheads in CMOS implementations, can be efficiently realized by exploiting the physical characteristics of spin devices. On the other hand, the reduced logic complexity and low logic depth of SC circuits alleviates the shortcomings of spintronic logic. Based on this insight, the design of spin-based stochastic arithmetic circuits, bitstream generators, bitstream permuters and stochastic-to-binary converter circuits are presented. Spintastic achieves 7.1X energy reduction over CMOS implementations for a wide range of benchmarks from the image processing, signal processing, and RMS application domains. 5) In order to evaluate the proposed spintronic designs, the thesis describes various device-to-architecture modeling frameworks. Starting with devices models that are calibrated to measurements, the characteristics of spintronic devices are successively abstracted into circuit-level and architectural models, which are incorporated into suitable simulation frameworks. (Abstract shortened by UMI.
TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010
TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month
Accelerating Time Series Analysis via Processing using Non-Volatile Memories
Time Series Analysis (TSA) is a critical workload for consumer-facing
devices. Accelerating TSA is vital for many domains as it enables the
extraction of valuable information and predict future events. The
state-of-the-art algorithm in TSA is the subsequence Dynamic Time Warping
(sDTW) algorithm. However, sDTW's computation complexity increases
quadratically with the time series' length, resulting in two performance
implications. First, the amount of data parallelism available is significantly
higher than the small number of processing units enabled by commodity systems
(e.g., CPUs). Second, sDTW is bottlenecked by memory because it 1) has low
arithmetic intensity and 2) incurs a large memory footprint. To tackle these
two challenges, we leverage Processing-using-Memory (PuM) by performing in-situ
computation where data resides, using the memory cells. PuM provides a
promising solution to alleviate data movement bottlenecks and exposes immense
parallelism.
In this work, we present MATSA, the first MRAM-based Accelerator for Time
Series Analysis. The key idea is to exploit magneto-resistive memory crossbars
to enable energy-efficient and fast time series computation in memory. MATSA
provides the following key benefits: 1) it leverages high levels of parallelism
in the memory substrate by exploiting column-wise arithmetic operations, and 2)
it significantly reduces the data movement costs performing computation using
the memory cells. We evaluate three versions of MATSA to match the requirements
of different environments (e.g., embedded, desktop, or HPC computing) based on
MRAM technology trends. We perform a design space exploration and demonstrate
that our HPC version of MATSA can improve performance by 7.35x/6.15x/6.31x and
energy efficiency by 11.29x/4.21x/2.65x over server CPU, GPU and PNM
architectures, respectively
An overview of next-generation architectures for machine learning: roadmap, opportunities and challenges in the IoT era
The number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices are expected to reach over 20 billion by 2020. These range from basic sensor nodes that log and report the data to the ones that are capable of processing the incoming information and taking an action accordingly. Machine learning, and in particular deep learning, is the de facto processing paradigm for intelligently processing these immense volumes of data. However, the resource inhibited environment of IoT devices, owing to their limited energy budget and low compute capabilities, render them a challenging platform for deployment of desired data analytics. This paper provides an overview of the current and emerging trends in designing highly efficient, reliable, secure and scalable machine learning architectures for such devices. The paper highlights the focal challenges and obstacles being faced by the community in achieving its desired goals. The paper further presents a roadmap that can help in addressing the highlighted challenges and thereby designing scalable, high-performance, and energy efficient architectures for performing machine learning on the edge
Extending fragment-based free energy calculations with library Monte Carlo simulation: Annealing in interaction space
Pre-calculated libraries of molecular fragment configurations have previously
been used as a basis for both equilibrium sampling (via "library-based Monte
Carlo") and for obtaining absolute free energies using a polymer-growth
formalism. Here, we combine the two approaches to extend the size of systems
for which free energies can be calculated. We study a series of all-atom
poly-alanine systems in a simple dielectric "solvent" and find that precise
free energies can be obtained rapidly. For instance, for 12 residues, less than
an hour of single-processor is required. The combined approach is formally
equivalent to the "annealed importance sampling" algorithm; instead of
annealing by decreasing temperature, however, interactions among fragments are
gradually added as the molecule is "grown." We discuss implications for future
binding affinity calculations in which a ligand is grown into a binding site
Approximate Computing Survey, Part II: Application-Specific & Architectural Approximation Techniques and Applications
The challenging deployment of compute-intensive applications from domains
such Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP), forces
the community of computing systems to explore new design approaches.
Approximate Computing appears as an emerging solution, allowing to tune the
quality of results in the design of a system in order to improve the energy
efficiency and/or performance. This radical paradigm shift has attracted
interest from both academia and industry, resulting in significant research on
approximation techniques and methodologies at different design layers (from
system down to integrated circuits). Motivated by the wide appeal of
Approximate Computing over the last 10 years, we conduct a two-part survey to
cover key aspects (e.g., terminology and applications) and review the
state-of-the art approximation techniques from all layers of the traditional
computing stack. In Part II of our survey, we classify and present the
technical details of application-specific and architectural approximation
techniques, which both target the design of resource-efficient
processors/accelerators & systems. Moreover, we present a detailed analysis of
the application spectrum of Approximate Computing and discuss open challenges
and future directions.Comment: Under Review at ACM Computing Survey
Index to 1984 NASA Tech Briefs, volume 9, numbers 1-4
Short announcements of new technology derived from the R&D activities of NASA are presented. These briefs emphasize information considered likely to be transferrable across industrial, regional, or disciplinary lines and are issued to encourage commercial application. This index for 1984 Tech B Briefs contains abstracts and four indexes: subject, personal author, originating center, and Tech Brief Number. The following areas are covered: electronic components and circuits, electronic systems, physical sciences, materials, life sciences, mechanics, machinery, fabrication technology, and mathematics and information sciences
- …