Cooperative Computing Techniques for a Deeply Fused and Heterogeneous Many-Core Processor Architecture

Due to advances in semiconductor techniques, many-core processors have been widely used in high performance computing. However, many applications still cannot be carried out efficiently due to the memory wall, which has become a bottleneck in many-core processors. In this paper, we present a novel heterogeneous many-core processor architecture named deeply fused many-core （DFMC） for high performance computing systems. DFMC integrates management processing ele- ments （MPEs） and computing processing elements （CPEs）, which are heterogeneous processor cores for different application features with a unified ISA （instruction set architecture）, a unified execution model, and share-memory that supports cache coherence. The DFMC processor can alleviate the memory wall problem by combining a series of cooperative computing techniques of CPEs, such as multi-pattern data stream transfer, efficient register-level communication mechanism, and fast hardware synchronization technique. These techniques are able to improve on-chip data reuse and optimize memory access performance. This paper illustrates an implementation of a full system prototype based on FPGA with four MPEs and 256 CPEs. Our experimental results show that the effect of the cooperative computing techniques of CPEs is significant, with DGEMM （double-precision matrix multiplication） achieving an efficiency of 94%, FFT （fast Fourier transform） obtaining a performance of 207 GFLOPS and FDTD （finite-difference time-domain） obtaining a performance of 27 GFLOPS.

Fault Tolerance Mechanism in Chip Many-Core Processors

As semiconductor technology advances, there will be billions of transistors on a single chip. Chip many-core processors are emerging to take advantage of these greater transistor densities to deliver greater performance. Effective fault tolerance techniques are essential to improve the yield of such complex chips. In this paper, a core-level redundancy scheme called N+M is proposed to improve N-core processors’ yield by providing M spare cores. In such architecture, topology is an important factor because it greatly affects the processors’ performance. The concept of logical topology and a topology reconfiguration problem are introduced, which is able to transparently provide target topology with lowest performance degradation as the presence of faulty cores on-chip. A row rippling and column stealing (RRCS) algorithm is also proposed. Results show that PRCS can give solutions with average 13.8% degradation with negligible computing time.

Parallelization and sustainability of distributed genetic algorithms on many-core processors

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to propose a fault-tolerant technology for increasing the durability of application programs when evolutionary computation is performed by fast parallel processing on many-core processors such as graphics processing units(GPUs)and multi-core processors(MCPs).Design/methodology/approach–For distributed genetic algorithm(GA)models,the paper proposes a method where an island’s ID number is added to the header of data transferred by this island for use in fault detection.Findings–The paper has shown that the processing time of the proposed idea is practically negligible in applications and also shown that an optimal solution can be obtained even with a single stuck-at fault or a transient fault,and that increasing the number of parallel threads makes the system less susceptible to faults.Originality/value–The study described in this paper is a new approach to increase the sustainability of application program using distributed GA on GPUs and MCPs.