Research Areas in HPCL

Communication-Centric Chip Multiprocessor Design (NSF CAREER, 2009 - 2014)

Chip Multiprocessor Systems (CMPs) have embarked a paradigm shift from computation-centric to communication-centric system design, as the number of cores in a chip increases. To overcome traditional interconnects problems, Network-on-Chip (NoC), using switch-based networks, has been widely accepted as a promising architecture to orchestrate chip-wide communication. Although interconnection network design has matured in the context of multiprocessor architectures, NoC has different characteristics for chip-wide communication support, making its design unique. For example, NoC can benefit from high wire densities and abundant metal layers. However, the cost of NoC is constrained in terms of power and area. The design of high-performance, low-power, and area-efficient NoC can be extremely challenging, because these different objectives conflict with each other in many cases. We are exploring innovative ideas on NOC design considering a multi-dimensional design space and technology constraints.

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Dynamic Thermal Management in CMPs

As the significant heat is converted by the ever-increasing power density and current leakage, the raised operating temperature in a chip have already threatened the system reliability and led the thermal control to be one of the most important issues needed to be addressed immediately in the chip design. Due to the cost and complexity of designing thermal packaging, many Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) schemes have been wildly adopted in the modern processors as a technique to control CPU power dissipation. However, it is known that the overall temperature of a CMPs is highly correlated with temperature of each core in the CMPs environments; hence, the thermal model for uniprocessor environments cannot be directly applied in CMPs due to the potential heterogeneity. To our best knowledge, none of prior DTM schemes considers the thermal correlation effect among neighboring cores, neither the dynamic workload behaviors which present different thermal behaviors. We believe that it is necessary to develop an efficient online workload estimation scheme for DTM to be applicable to the real world applications which have variable workload behaviors and different thermal contributions to the increased chip temperature.

High Performance, Energy Efficient and Secure Cluster design (NSF project, 2006 - 2009)

Clusters have been widely accepted as the most effective solution to design high performance servers, which are increasingly being deployed in supporting a wide variety of Web-based services. Along with high and predictable performance, optimization of energy consumption in these servers has become a serious concern due to their high power budgets. In addition, the critical nature of many Internet-based services mandates that these systems should be robust to attacks from the Internet, since numerous security loopholes of cluster servers have been revealed. Although some initial investigation on cluster energy consumption and security has appeared recently, an in-depth design and analysis of a cluster interconnect considering the three parameters mentioned above have not been undertaken.

·        High Performance and Energy Efficient Cluster Interconnect Design

·        Secure Cluster System

·        High Performance Web Cluster

Embedded Software Solutions in Wireless Environments (ETRI project, 2005 - 2008)

In this project, we attempt to provide software solutions for these two applications; multimedia streaming services in wireless LAN environments and fault-tolerant wireless sensor network design. Video streaming is currently gaining more interest from end-users as their access speed to network is steadily increasing. Due to the increasing popularity of hand-held devices and wireless laptops, the final access points are mostly in wireless environments. For energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks, dynamic reconfiguration, where only a subset of sensor nodes is active with some interval, has been widely adopted. However, maintaining required K-coverage and connectivity is critical for the dynamic reconfiguration of wireless sensor networks.