Design and Implementation of a Special Purpose Cache for the Roll Back Chip

摘要

The Roll-back chip is an integral part of a special purpose simulation engine based on the Time-Warp mechanism. The RBC is in the critical path of the system and the roll-back processor should not have to access the memory in performing critical operations. We describe the design and implementation (in VLSI) of a special purpose cache that stores the most recently accessed data and performs certain operations on it. The goal of this project was to implement the Cache in VLSI. This is intended to be a prototype chip. The environment in which it will operate was constantly evolving at the time of writing of this report. In fact, the specifications of the Cache itself changed as we were implementing it. A strong case was made in the introduction for the implementation of rollback capabilities in hardware. As of today, no hardware exists to support rollback capabilities in distributed simulation environments. Further research on this topic is underway at the Computer Science department of the University of Utah. (rh)