Section: Overall Objectives

Panorama

Multicore processors have now become mainstream for both general-purpose and embedded computing. In the near future, every hardware platform will feature thread level parallelism. Therefore, the overall computer science research community, but also industry, is facing new challenges; parallel architectures will have to be exploited by every application from HPC computing, web and entreprise servers, but also PCs, smartphones and ubiquitous embedded systems.

Within a decade, it will become technologically feasible to implement 1000s of cores on a single chip. However, several challenges must be addressed to allow the end-user to benefit from these 1000's cores chips. At that time, most applications will not be fully parallelized, therefore the effective performance of most computer systems will strongly depend on their performance on sequential sections and sequential control threads: Amdahl's law is forever. Parallel applications will not become mainstream if they have to be adapted to each new platform, therefore a simple performance scalability/portability path is needed for these applications. In many application domains, particularly in real-time systems, the effective use of multicore chips will depend on the ability of the software and hardware vendors to accurately assess the performance of applications.

The ALF team regroups researchers in computer architecture, software/compiler optimization, and real-time systems. The long-term goal of the ALF project-team is to allow the end-user to benefit from the 2020's many-core platform. We address this issue through architecture, i.e. we try to influence the definition of the 2020's many-core architecture, compiler, i.e. we intend to provide new code generation techniques for efficient execution on many-core architectures and performance prediction/guarantee, i.e. we try to propose new software and architecture techniques to predict/guarantee the response time of many-core architectures.

High performance on single thread process and sequential code is a key issue for enabling overall high performance on a 1000's cores system. Therefore, we anticipate that future manycore architectures will implement heterogeneous design featuring many simple cores and a few complex cores. Hence the research in the ALF project focuses on refining the microarchitecture to achieve high performance on single thread process and/or sequential code sections. We focus our architecture research in two main directions 1) enhancing the microarchitecture of high-end superscalar processors, 2) exploiting/modifying heterogeneous multicore architecture on a single thread. We also tackle a technological/architecture issue, the temperature wall.

Compilers are keystone solutions for any approach that deals with high performance on 100+ core systems. But general-purpose compilers try to embrace so many domains and try to serve so many constraints that they frequently fail to achieve very high performance. They need to be deeply revisited. We identify four main compiler/software related issues that must be addressed in order to allow efficient use of multi- and many-cores: 1) programming 2) resource management 3) application deployment 4) portable performance. Addressing these challenges requires to revisit parallel programming and code generation extensively.

While compiler and architecture research efforts often focus on maximizing average case performance, applications with real-time constraints do not only need high performance but also performance guarantees in all situations, including the worst-case situation. Worst-Case Execution Time estimates (WCET) need to be upper bounds of any possible execution time. The amount of safety required depends on the criticality of applications. Within the ALF team, our objective is to study performance guarantees for both (i) sequential codes running on complex cores ; (ii) parallel codes running on multicores.

Our research is partially supported by industry (Intel,STmicroelectronics), the ANR W-SEPT, ANR Continuum and ANR CHIST-ERA SECODE projects, the "projet d'investissement d'avenir" Usine Nouvelle (the project Capacités) and the European Union (NoE HiPEAC3, ERC grant DAL, Antarex, Eurolab-4-HPC, ARGO and COST action TACLe).