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Addressing Variability in GALS Architectures

Tuesday March 28, 2006
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:30 pm



Sebastian Herbert
Carnegie Mellon University

Globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) architectures have been proposed as a means of reducing the amount of a processor's power budget that is used in the clock network. The core is partitioned into several domains, each of which is clocked independently. This partitioning also presents opportunities to recover some of the performance that is lost to variability due to over-design. In this talk I present two methods for doing so: one which statically attacks within-die process variability and another which dynamically addresses thermal variability. The first is predicated on the observation that each domain has fewer critical paths than the fully synchronous processor as a whole, shifting the mean of the FMAX distribution towards higher speeds. The second takes advantage of the fact that the effect of a thermal hotspot on delay can be isolated to the domain it is in. In the process, several feedback loops between delay, frequency, power, and temperature are closed. I will present preliminary results which show that even naive implementations can bring about modest improvements in both performance and energy-delay-squared product when compared to a baseline GALS architecture.


Sebastian is a first-year PhD student working under Diana Marculescu. His research interests include energy- and variability-aware architectures and how these are affected by the move to multicore. His current research focuses on schemes for assigning frequencies and supply voltages in GALS microprocessors. Sebastian received a BSE in Computer Engineering and BS in Computer Science from Tulane University in 2005.

 

Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringCarnegie Mellon UniversitySchool of Computer Science