A Methodology for Creating Application Specific Processor Architectures

*Professor Kumar will be available 4-5pm in EEB-248 to talk to PhD students from any engineering department interested in faculty positions at IIT Delhi.Abstract:
Performance improvement through datapath extensions with Application Specific Functional Units has been a subject of research for more than a decade now. However, we feel that full potential of this approach has not been exploited due to several obstacles. This talk presents techniques to get past some of these obstacles.Usually a cluster of operations identified from the application defines a new custom instruction and forms the behavior of an Application Specific Functional Unit that implements this instruction. In the techniques available for identifying such clusters, the number of register file ports constrains the number of inputs and outputs for a legal operation cluster, thus limiting the overall achievable speedup. We present a technique that circumvents the constraints imposed by register file ports and results in a significantly higher speed up. In addition, our identification algorithm runs 2 to 3 orders faster than a typical I/O constrained identification approach.The second issue we take up here is estimation of the speedup achievable for the clusters identified. In order to select the right clusters, we need to correctly estimate the speedup taking into account what we call as temporal and spatial reuse of the clusters. In absence of efficient techniques to do so, researchers compromise either on the quality of estimates or on the number of clusters examined. We propose a novel method by which each cluster’s reuse information can be derived very efficiently, making it possible to generate high quality custom instructions.Bio:
Anshul Kumar is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi. He obtained his B.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees from IIT Delhi in the years 1974 and 1980 respectively and was awarded the President's Gold Medal in 1974. He has been involved in teaching and research at IIT Delhi for more than 20 years in the areas of VLSI synthesis, embedded systems and high performance computer architectures and has published or presented nearly hundred papers. He has held visiting appointments at Univ of Southern California Los Angeles, University of Edinburgh, KTH Stockholm and EPFL Laussane. Along with some colleagues and graduating students of his department, he recently founded a company called Kritikal Solutions under the Technology Business Incubation Program of IIT Delhi.Host: Prof. Sandeep Gupta, Ext. 02251

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Aimee Barnard