Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	MASA Stream Architecture and Evaluating for a Fluid Computing Application
Authors	WU Nan WEN Mei HE Yi XUN Chang-Qing REN Ju CHAI Jun ZHANG Chun-Yuan
Address	(PDL, School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073)
Year	2008
Issue	No.1(133—141)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract This paper presents MASA stream architecture which supporting 64b operation for scientific computing, and which characteristics are stress locality, parallelism, decoupling of memory operations. It matches the capabilities of modern semiconductor technology with computer-intensive parallel applications and allows for high performance of compiler optimized code. Given a fluid computing application as a case, the authors used a cycle-accurate hardware simulator to analyze the performance of the implementation and to measure application run-time. A comparison with the code, tuned for traditional general purpose processors, confirms the stream processor′s potential to deliver high performance. keywords stream processor; architecture; scientific computing; Ygx2; MASA background Stream architecture is an emerging architecture which was originally developed for media processing. Stream architecture operates on data streams, provides multiple-level bandwidth hierarchy and makes ALU arrays execute with full loads. Stream programming model exposes the parallelism and locality of stream applications in a manner that is well matched to the capabilities of modern VLSI technology. Research shows that programmable stream processor can achieve high performance for some intensive computing applications, which is comparable to special processor. Compared to traditional general purpose processor, stream processor owns simple instruction control and storage logic with a large amount of programmable arithmetic units and programmable communication channels. It is suited for VLSI technology′s development trend. However, stream architecture′s research is in the primary level. If application domain of stream architecture should extend to scientific computing, many key technologies need to be studied. This paper presents the MASA stream architecture for scientific computing, and uses the cycle-accurate simulator to evaluate the performance by mapping fluid computing application on the MASA. The research is supported by the National Natural Sciences Fund (NSFC). The project is advantageous in the solution stream architecture′s key technologies and the scientific problem, has the great significance in producing the original new generation of super computation chip. The research team started from 2003 to carry the research. Till now, they published high level papers in international/domestic conference more than 20, in which 7 papers were indexed by SCI. And they participated in the FT64 chip design, at present the chip already was received at National University of Defense Technology(NUDT). This article result confirms the stream processor′s potential to deliver high performance for the scientific computing, and it solves the part key question when stream architecture expands to the science computation domain in NSFC project. The paper also demonstrates that MASA stream architecture has good scalability and is suitable for broader stream application domains and VLSI technology trend.