Modelling many-core architectures

Abstract

Architectural modelling has two primary objectives: (1) navigating the design space exploration, i.e. guiding the architects to arrival at better design choices, and (2) facilitating dynamic management, i.e. providing the functional relationships between workloads'characteristics and architectural configurations to enable appropriate runtime hardware/software adaptations. In the past years, many-core architectures, as a typical computing fabric evolving from the monolithic single-/multicore architectures, have been shown to be scalable to uphold the staggering the Moore's Law. The many-core architectures enable two orthogonal approaches, scale-up and scale-out, to utilize the growing budget of transistors. Understanding the rationale behind these approaches is critical to make more efficient use of the powerful computing fabric.