Method for designing specialized computing systems based on hardware and software co-optimization

Abstract

Objectives. Following the completion of development stages due to transistor scaling (Dennard’s law) and an increased number of general-purpose processor cores (limited by Amdahl’s law), further improvements in the performance of computing systems naturally proceeds to the stage of developing specialized computing subsystems for performing specific tasks within a limited computational subclass. The development of such systems requires both the selection of the relevant high-demand tasks and the application of design techniques for achieving desired indicators within the developed specializations at very large scales of integration. The purpose of the present work is to develop a methodology for designing specialized computing systems based on the joint optimization of hardware and software in relation to a selected subclass of problems.Methods. The research is based on various methods for designing digital systems.Results. Approaches to the analysis of computational problems involving the construction of a computational graph abstracted from the computing platform, but limited by a set of architectural solutions, are considered. The proposed design methodology based on a register transfer level (RTL) representation synthesizer of a computing device is limited to individual computing architectures for which the relevant circuit is synthesized and optimized based on a high-level input description of the algorithm. Among computing node architectures, a synchronous pipeline and a processor core with a tree-like arithmetic-logical unit are considered. The efficiency of a computing system can be increased by balancing the pipeline based on estimates of the technological basis, and for the processor—based on optimizing the set of operations, which is performed based on the analysis of the abstract syntax tree graph with its optimal coverage by subgraphs corresponding to the structure of the arithmetic logic unit.Conclusions. The considered development approaches are suitable for accelerating the process of designing specialized computing systems with a massively parallel architecture based on pipeline or processor computing nodes.

Keywords

• processor
• rtl
• synthesis
• translator