A Powerful yet Ecological Parallel Processing System using Execution-based Adaptive Power-down Control and Compact Quadruple-Precision Assist FPUs

摘要

We have developed a general-purpose parallel processing system with fine-grained execution-based adaptive power-down control and compact quadruple-precision assist floating-point execution units (FPUs), and demonstrated it in a test chip. Our aim is to break the power wall and build large computing systems and to overcome the increase in accumulated numerical errors in large-scale computation. An overview of our system is shown in Fig.1. The system features up to millions of processing nodes, where each node has one main processor and several sub-processors. Each processor has integrated quadruple-precision execution units and individual frequency/back-bias control for local power-down. This paper reports the first trial in which spatially and temporally fine-grained power-down control has been implemented in a high-performance processor in the sense that the FPUs are controlled spatially and dynamically based on the execution sequence.