[talks] Colloquium-Tuesday, September 22

Michele J. Brown mjbrown at CS.Princeton.EDU
Fri Sep 18 14:27:46 EDT 2009


*Distinguished Speaker

Ivan Sutherland*,
Portland State University
*
*Small Auditorium (105)
Computer Science Building
4:30 pm

*"Fleet, Infinity & Marina"*

This talk describes a radically different architecture for computing 
called Fleet. Fleet accepts the limitations to computing imposed by 
physics: moving data costs more energy, more delay, and more chip area 
than the arithmetic and logical operations ordinarily called 
"computing." Fleet puts the programmer firmly in charge of the most 
costly resource: communication. Fleet treats arithmetic and logical 
operations as side effects of where the programmer sends data.

Fleet achieves high performance through fine grain concurrency. 
Everything Fleet does is concurrent at the lowest level; programmers who 
wish sequential behavior must program it explicitly. Fleet presents a 
stark contrast to today's multi-core machines in which programmers seek 
concurrency in an inherently sequential environment.

The Fleet architecture uses a uniform switch fabric to simplify chip 
design. A few thousand identical copies of a configurable interface will 
connect a thousand or so repetitions of basic arithmetic, logical, 
input-output, and storage units to the switch fabric. The uniform switch 
fabric and the identical configurable interfaces will simplify many of 
the hard parts of designing the computing elements themselves.

Both software and FPGA simulators of a Fleet system are available at UC 
Berkeley. Berkeley students have written a variety of Fleet programs; 
their work helped to define what the configurable interface between 
computing and communication must do. A simple compiler configures both 
source and destination to provide flow-controlled communication. We 
expect work on a higher-level language for Fleet to appear soon as a 
Berkeley PhD dissertation.

Last year we built a 90 nanometer TSMC test chip, called Infinity, at 
Sun Microsystems. Infinity demonstrated the switch fabric running at 
about 4 GHz. We now have a new test chip, called Marina, also in 
90-nanometer TSMC sponsored by Sun. Marina shows correct operation of 
the configurable switch fabric interface. Together Infinity and Marina 
give us confidence to build a complete Fleet. We seek participation from 
sponsors, computer scientists, and hardware designers.

*BIO:*
Ivan Sutherland is a Visiting Scientist at Portland State University 
where he and Marly Roncken have recently established the "Asynchronous 
Research Center" (ARC). The ARC occupies both physical and intellectual 
space half way between the Computer Science (CS) and Electrical and 
Computer Engineering (ECE) departments at the university. The ARC seeks 
to free designers from the tyranny of the clock by developing better 
tools and teaching methods for design of self-timed systems. Prior to 
moving to Portland, Ivan spent 25 years as a Fellow at Sun Microsystems. 
A 1959 graduate of Carnegie Tech, Ivan got his PhD at MIT in 1963 and 
has taught at Harvard, The University of Utah, and Caltech. Ivan is a 
member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy 
of Sciences.



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