Morph - Inherently Low-Power Architectures
To attack the problem of exploding power disipation, the Morph group at Notre Dame has sponsored a long-term effort to investigate ways of producing inherently low-power systems by emphasizing architectural, not circuit techniques. Partners include JPL and SUNY Binghamton. Recent work has led to a suite of new microarchitectural techniques that have dramatically decreased the inherent energy per instruction. Further is the ability to dynamically change properties of this microarchitecture to adjust the performance of the CPU to match demand, and improve this energy complexity even further. The result is a huge improvements in performance per watt over conventional techniques, especially when performance demands are very bursty. Applications range from portable devices (where standby battery life is important), through computers for deep space exploration (where there simply isnt much energy available), to supercomputers (where the heat from huge numbers of processors can become a determining factor in all aspects of the machine).
Materials to be available include posters (both real and virtual) summarizing the microarchitectural techniques. Booth presentations are planned. Several of the key faculty members and graduate students will be in attendance.