Architectural adaptation for application-specific locality optimizations

Abstract

We propose a machine architecture that integrates programmable logic into key components of the system with the goal of customizing architectural mechanisms and policies to match an application. This approach presents an improvement over the traditional approach of exploiting programmable logic as a separate co-processor by pre-serving machine usability through software and on a traditional computer architecture by providing application-specific hardware. We present two case studies of architectural customization to enhance latency tolerance and efficiently utilize network bisection on multiprocessors for sparse matrix computations. We demonstrate that application-specific hardware and policies can provide substantial improvements in performance on a per application basis. Based on these preliminary results, we propose that an application-driven machine customization provides a promising approach to achieve high performance and combat performance fragility.