Simulation and performance estimation for the Rewrite Rule Machine

The authors give an overview of the Rewrite Rule Machine's (RRM's) architecture and discuss performance estimates based on very detailed register-level simulations at the chip level, together with more abstract simulations and modeling for higher levels. For a 10000 ensemble RRM, the present estimates are as follows. (1) The raw peak performance is 576 trillion operations per second. (2) For general symbolic applications, ensemble Sun-relative speedup is roughly 6.7, and RRM performance with a wormhole network at 88% efficiency gives an idealized Sun-relative speedup of 59000. (3) For highly regular symbolic applications (the sorting problem is taken as a typical example), ensemble performance is a Sun-relative speedup of 127, and RRM performance is estimated at over 80% efficiency (relative to the cluster performance), yielding a Sun-relative speedup of over 91. (4) For systolic applications (a 2-D fluid flow problem is taken as a typical example), ensemble performance is a Sun-relative speedup of 400-670, and cluster-level performance, which should be attainable in practice, is at 82% efficiency.<>