🚀 go-pugleaf

Weekly SDI/LCS Seminar
Thursday, March 9
Noon - 1 pm
Wean Hall - Room 8220
Contact:  deb@cs or karen@ece

Speaker: Kip Walker

Title:  Reconfigurable Function Units for General-Purpose Processors

Abstract:

Reconfigurable computing has achieved very high performance for a number
of important applications including encryption and multimedia
processing. Existing reconfigurable devices, such as FPGAs, are
typically found in embedded settings or as bus-attached coprocessors.
Several research groups have begun to consider the possibility of
including reconfigurable logic in general-purpose processors. Such a
"reconfigurable functional unit" (RFU) could expose the benefits of
application-specialization and logic-customization that are not
available even with the latest superscalar, out-of-order processor by
allowing a compiler to augment the instruction set with operations that
are customized to a particular application. This talk will introduce
many of the design considerations involved in evaluating the usefulness
of reconfigurable functional units. Design choices must weigh the
tradeoff between improved ability to speedup applications and increasing
hardware complexity and cost. Examples of the kinds of decisions that
must be made are the number of inputs and outputs an operation can have,
whether an operation can include memory accesses, and whether an
operation may create state in the RFU. A more practical concern is that
the architecture must be easy to program or its benefits will be unused.
Part of our research addresses compiler techniques for generating code
that takes advantage of a RFU. Some early simulation results will be
presented.

Bio:

Kip Walker received a B.S. degree in Math and Computer Science from
Carnegie Mellon in 1996. The lure of life as a grad student in
Pittsburgh led him to join the PhD program later that year. He works
with Seth Goldstein in the Reconfigurable Computing project.