非精确加速器结构与编程的若干关键技术的研究

项目名称： 非精确加速器结构与编程的若干关键技术的研究

项目编号： No.61472396

项目类型： 面上项目

立项/批准年度： 2015

项目学科： 自动化技术、计算机技术

项目作者： Olivier Temam

作者单位： 中国科学院计算技术研究所

项目金额： 84万元

中文摘要： 由于受到封装功耗和散热方面的限制，未来芯片上只有一部分晶体管能够同时全速工作。因此，未来芯片上将会集成多种面向不同应用、不同时开启的高能效加速器。我们注意到，大量新兴应用（包括云端的大数据处理和终端的智能计算）都能在一定程度上容忍计算过程中的误差和非精确性。针对上述应用特征，我们可以在可容忍的范围内牺牲计算的精确性，换取加速器性能功耗比的大幅提高。因此，研究这类新型加速器的结构设计和编程方法有重要的现实意义。 本项目拟通过对非精确计算的误差分析和控制，解决非精确高能效加速器的结构设计以及编程方法中的一系列关键难题，包括非精确高能效加速器的结构设计原理与方法、误差和能效之间最佳权衡的非精确计算加速器的结构、非精确计算加速器的验证和测试的方法学、适用于多种非精确加速器的编程环境、多个非精确加速器间任务调度方法等。最终本项目将形成一套非精确加速器的参考设计、样片和编程工具，为国内外同行提供借鉴。

中文关键词： 非精确计算；加速器；微体系结构；编程模型；误差容忍

英文摘要： Due to the limitations of encapsulation and cooling, only a part of transistors on a future chip can operate at their full speeds. Hence, future chip will contain a number of highly energy-efficient accelerators which focus on different application domains respectively. We observe that many emerging applications, including big data processing on cloud server and computational intelligence task on mobile phone, can tolerate inexactness of computation in some extent. Therefore, to design energy-efficient accelerators for these applications, we can sacrifice the precision of computation results to obtain higher performance and lower energy consumption. Hence, it is important to investigate the architecture and programming model of such inexact accelerators. In this project, we plan to investigate the analysis and control of error caused by inexact computation, so as to solve some important problems in the design and programming of energy-efficient inexact accelerator, including the design principle of energy-efficient inexact accelerator, the trade-off strategy between error and energy-efficiency, the verification and test methodology of inexact accelerator, the programming environment for various inexact accelerators, and the scheduling strategy between multi inexact accelerators. Our project will produce a reference design of inexact accelerator, a test chip of inexact accelerator, and a programming tool for inexact accelerator, which can be referenced by the society.

英文关键词： Inexact Computing;Accelerator;Microarchitecture;Programming Model;Fault Tolerance