News

Prof. Cong was invited to give a keynote speech on "Customized Computing -- Adapting Architecture to Application" at GreenCom 2011 on Aug. 4, 2011.

Abstract: We propose the following three-stage approach to customizable domain-specific computing that carefully balances software and hardware considerations in the spirit of software-hardware co-design as illustrated in the following figure.

Domain-specific modeling. In the first stage, we propose to create a representative set of executable application models using Domain-Specific Language Extensions (DSLEs) and a Domain-Specific Coordination Graph (DSCG) notation, both of which are designed to be accessible to domain experts. These models can be used to reveal intrinsic high-level properties of the application domain, such as intrinsic parallelism and communication topologies. This domain-specific modeling will be used as an input for the later CHP creation and CHP mapping stages.
CHP creation. In this second stage, we use the application models to design and implement an optimized set of hardware resources (CHP) for a particular application domain (or a set of related domains). The CHP creation determines how many cores, how much cache, which custom instructions, what amount of customization and reconfiguration, and what sorts of mapping transformations would be useful for customization. The decision will be driven by a set of representative applications with domain-specific modeling that specifies their computation requirements.
CHP mapping. Given a set of application models and an optimized CHP for a given domain, the third problem is CHP mapping, which develops domain-specific compilation and runtime systems that enable optimized mappings of the applications in the domain of the given CHP to make the best use of heterogeneous resources in the CHP. It also determines what configuration and transformation settings should be selected for configurable CHP resources in different phases of the program. The following figure illustrates the overall software stack for CHP mapping.