New Methodologies for Parallel Architecture

Moore's law continues to grant computer architects ever more transistors in the foreseeable future, and parallelism is the key to continued performance scaling in modern microprocessors. In this paper, the achievements in our research project, which is supported by the National Basic Research 973 Program of China, on parallel architecture, are systematically presented. The innovative approaches and techniques to solve the significant problems in parallel architecture design are summarized, including architecture level optimization, compiler and language-supported technologies, reliability, power-performance efficient design, test and verification challenges, and platform building. Two prototype chips, a multi-heavy-core Godson-3 and a many-light-core Godson-T, are described to demonstrate the highly scalable and reconfigurable parallel architecture designs. We also present some of our achievements appearing in ISCA, MICRO, ISSCC, HPCA, PLDI, PACT, IJCAI, Hot Chips, DATE, IEEE Trans. VLSI, IEEE Micro, IEEE Trans. Computers, etc.