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Stream Processors

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Multicore Processors and Systems

Part of the book series: Integrated Circuits and Systems ((ICIR))

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Abstract

Stream processors, like other multi core architectures partition their functional units and storage into multiple processing elements. In contrast to typical architectures, which contain symmetric general-purpose cores and a cache hierarchy, stream processors have a significantly leaner design. Stream processors are specifically designed for the stream execution model, in which applications have large amounts of explicit parallel computation, structured and predictable control, and memory accesses that can be performed at a coarse granularity. Applications in the streaming model are expressed in a gather–compute–scatter form, yielding programs with explicit control over transferring data to and from on-chip memory. Relying on these characteristics, which are common to many media processing and scientific computing applications, stream architectures redefine the boundary between software and hardware responsibilities with software bearing much of the complexity required to manage concurrency, locality, and latency tolerance. Thus, stream processors have minimal control consisting of fetching medium- and coarse-grained instructions and executing them directly on the many ALUs. Moreover, the on-chip storage hierarchy of stream processors is under explicit software control, as is all communication, eliminating the need for complex reactive hardware mechanisms.

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Steve Keckler for his insightful comments as well as the contributions of Jung Ho Ahn, Nuwan Jayasena, and Brucek Khailany. In addition, we are grateful to the entire Imagine and Merrimac teams and the projects’ sponsors.

Imagine was supported by a Sony Stanford Graduate Fellowship, an Intel Foundation Fellowship, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA order E254 and monitored by the Army Intelligence Center under contract DABT63-96-C0037 and by ARPA order L172 monitored by the Department of the Air Force under contract F29601-00-2-0085.

The Merrimac Project was supported by the Department of Energy ASCI Alliances Program, Contract LLNL-B523583, with Stanford University as well as the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship program.

Portions of this chapter are reprinted with permission from the following sources:

  • U. J. Kapasi, S. Rixner, W. J. Dally, B. Khailany, J. H. Ahn, P. Mattson, and J. D. Owens, “Programmable Stream Processors,” IEEE Computer, August 2003 (©2003 IEEE).

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  • Stream Processors Inc., “Stream Processing: Enabling the New Generation of Easyto Use, High-Performance DSPs,” White Paper (© 2007 Stream Processors Inc.).

  • B. K. Khailany, T. Williams, J. Lin, E. P. Long, M. Rygh, D. W. Tovey, and W. J. Dally, “A Programmable 512 GOPS Stream Processor for Signal, Image, and Video Processing,” Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal, 43(1):202–213, 2008 (© 2008 IEEE).

  • J. H. Ahn, M. Erez, and W. J. Dally, “Tradeoff between Data-, Instruction-, and Thread-level Parallelism in Stream Processors,” In Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS’07), June 2007 (DOI10.1145/1274971.1274991). © 2007 ACM, Inc. Included here by permission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, 78712, Austin, TX, USA

    Mattan Erez

  2. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    William J. Dally

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  1. Mattan Erez
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Correspondence to Mattan Erez .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Natural Sciences, University of Texas, Austin, University Station 1, Austin, 78712-0233, U.S.A.

    Stephen W. Keckler

  2. Dept. Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305-9510, U.S.A.

    Kunle Olukotun

  3. IBM Software Group, Burnet Rd. 11501, Austin, 78758, U.S.A.

    H. Peter Hofstee

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Erez, M., Dally, W.J. (2009). Stream Processors. In: Keckler, S., Olukotun, K., Hofstee, H. (eds) Multicore Processors and Systems. Integrated Circuits and Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0263-4_8

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