Programmable Architectures for
Communication Systems
D. K. Arvind
Institute for Computing Systems Architecture,
Division of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh,
Mayfield Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, Scotland.
Email: dka@dcs.ed.ac.uk
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Edinburgh - The Capital City
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Overview
 University of Edinburgh
 Division of Informatics
 Edinburgh InfoLab
 Research
 Collaboration
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
University of Edinburgh
 Founded in 1583
 Student Population - 18,023 :
 Undergraduate - 15,350; Postgraduate - 2,673
 Staff - 6,649 :
 Academic Staff - 3,312
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Division of Informatics
“Informatics is the study of the structure, behaviour,
and interactions of both natural and artificial
computational systems.”
(http://www.informatics.ed.ac.uk/)
•Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation
•Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications
•Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems
•Institute for Perception, Action and Behaviour
•Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science
•Institute for Computing Systems Architecture
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Division of Informatics
 Informatics@Edinburgh enjoys an international
reputation for both its teaching and research
 Only department in the UK awarded the top 5*A
research rating in Computer Science in Dec. 2001
 UK’s biggest department with 87 research-active
staff and 165 PhD students
 Edinburgh-Stanford strategic research partnership
 Location of the National e-Science Centre
 Awarded top Excellent rating in the Teaching
Quality Assessment
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
The Future ….
• Proliferation of Peer-to-Peer computing
• fundamental force of change and restructuring
• Examples
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Cybiko - P2P wireless networked games
Napster - P2P sharing of music
Freenet - P2P information store
DoCoMo – P2P communication
• Unregulated communications channels
• ISM, UWB, free-space optics, …..
• System-on-Chip components
• banalisation of silicon technology
• Silicon falling behind
• storage & bandwidth improving at a greater rate
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
P2P systems - Challenges
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http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Portability - Java, .NET
Performance - exploit concurrency
Mobility - size and energy consumption
Flexibility - soft- and hard-programmability
Research Focus
“To explore novel architectures for P2P systems using banalised
technology, and enlighten future development of disruptive
products and business change”
Our research is seeking programmable solutions which :
• harness progress in (a) technology (b) theory
• implement high-performance algorithms and applications efficiently
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Disruptive technology opportunities
System Architectures to explore …
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http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Personal switch/P2P processor
Hubless, ephemeral, transient networks
Info-torch/Info-Klieg light
P2Pn library|phone|gaming
Trends in the silicon fabric
• Convergence of transduction, communication and
computation - heterogeneous systems with sensors
and actuators
• High performance computation at modest power
consumption
• Pre-designed IP blocks with different timing
characteristics
• The dominance of programmable fabrics - both softand hard-programmable
• The complexity of the designs will demand novel
architectures and design styles
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
The Die Area reachable in 1 clock cycle (1.2 GHz)
At 0.1um (1 Billion transistors)
only 16% of the chip is
reachable in 1 clock cycle
Dominance of interconnect
delays over computational ones
Network of Temporal Regions
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Micronets - An alternative vision of Systems Architecture
Micronet or Network-on-Chip : a network of entities
which operate concurrently and communicate
asynchronously
Fractal model of system design: network of sub-systems,
down to network of transistors
Control is layered and distributed locally - behaviour can
be decomposed to run on architectural clusters with the
optimal mix of computational elements
A clean separation between computation and
communication, and, behaviour and timing - leads to a
compositional design style
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Behaviour-Architecture Co-design
• Integration Platforms composed of networks (micronets) of heterogeneous
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computational entities that operate in a multi-threaded fashion.
Applications composed of software blocks: some pre-defined, such as
communication protocols; others, more specific to the application.
Co-design (Step 1) : recognise concurrent operations and optimise
communication at different levels of granularity in the application and
map them to the platform
Co-design (Step 2) : explore the trade-off between programmability (both
soft- and hard-), and performance (MOPS/mWatt) of the application
running on the platform
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
The COMPASS Design Environment
•Visualisation
•Java or C
of energy and
performance
effects of
compiler
optimisations
applications
•Distributed
•Soft- and Hard-
simulation
platform on a
16-node
Beowulf
cluster
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•SSA
intermediate
representation
programmability
Design framework for programmable multi-threaded systems
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A micronet-based multi-threaded architecture
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Automatic Synthesis of Micronet Architecture from Specification
void
Micronet(chan tinst Inst, chan tpc Pc, chan tregval RegDump, chan Word MemDump)
{
//Define channels
chan tinst ALUinst, MUinst;
chan tpc ALUpc;
chan tack ALUCUack, MUCUack;
chan tregreq RegRequest;
chan tregreturn Xout, Yout;
chan tregval ALUXin, ALUYin, MUXin, MUYin;
chan twriteback toReg, ALUWBout, MUWBout;
chan bool KillBus;
//Spawn linked Functional Units in Parallel
//+ clock 32
par{
//Buffers for register requests
//+ clock 32
ControlUnit(Inst, Pc,
ALUinst, MUinst,
ALUCUack, MUCUack,
ALUpc,
RegRequest,
KillBus
);
//+ clock 50
RegisterBank(RegRequest,
//Requests
//Lock writeback registers
Xout, Yout,
//To the bus
toReg,
RegDump);
//Writeback
//X bus
//+ clock 32
BusSplit(Xout, ALUXin, MUXin);
//Y bus
//+ clock 32
BusSplit(Yout, ALUYin, MUYin);
//+ clock 50
ALU(ALUinst, ALUXin, ALUYin, ALUCUack, ALUpc, ALUWBout);
//+ clock 32
MU(MUinst, MUXin, MUYin, MUCUack, MUWBout, MemDump);
//Writeback bus
//+ clock 32
BusMerge(ALUWBout, MUWBout, toReg, KillBus);
}
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Power/Speed estimations on the M/T architecture
TPU 1
TPU 0
Overall
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Power - Speed Tradeoff for Programs executing on Micronet Architectures
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Example of an Internet Appliance
• Bluetooth-based system in VCC
• Two physical objects: the WAPmobile,
and a WAP `phone
• The behaviour of an internet- and
Bluetooth-enabled Basestation, and a
Bluetooth-enabled robot is simulated in
VCC
• The WAP phone controls the robot in
real-time via the VCC behavioural
models
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Proven Research Expertise in Systems Architecture
• Programmable Architecture Design
• Micronet-based asynchronous architectures
• Java and C compilation for multi-threaded embedded systems
• Applications include Bluetooth- and 802.11-based ones
• Vertically-integrated environment (COMPASS) for energyconscious, high-performance embedded system design
• Industrial research partners
• Well-endowed laboratory, including a 16-node Beowulf
cluster for simulations and state-of-the-art EDA tools
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Model for Collaboration
• Feature set
• ‘Beyond the envelope’ research
• Pre-competitive : several industrial partners
• industrial support : funding, equipment, body swap,….
• Successful Examples
• Silicon Structures (Caltech 1977 - 81)
• Berkeley Wireless Research Center (1998 - )
• MIT Media Lab (1987 - )
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Road Map
• Creation of the “Edinburgh InfoLab” to research
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architectures for future P2P systems
5 founding industrial partners/subscribers
30 PhD students in the steady state
Partners’ contributions: Two 4-year PhD studentships
per year, cumulatively for 3 years
Interested? Email: dka@dcs.ed.ac.uk
More details at http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka
Thank You
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~dka