The institution patents two mechanisms that help improve the performance of these devices
The University of Murcia has patented two solutions that help improve the performance of today’s multiprocessors, which are present in the vast majority of devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, desktop computers and high-performance servers. In particular, performance is improved, that is, applications run faster and energy consumption is lower, both in mobile phones, which last longer, and in high-performance servers, which are characterized by high energy consumption.
These advances have been realized within the research group of the UMU CAPS (Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems). Members of this group are currently developing a European project called ECHO (Extending Coherence for Hardware-driven Optimizations), which aims to improve the speculation techniques used in current processors. “Speculation is a fundamental mechanism to obtain high performance and consists of advancing the work of the processor without being sure whether that work will be necessary or even correct,” explains Professor Alberto Ros Bardisa, principal investigator of this project, from.
The ECHO project proposes a paradigm shift. While current processors focus on improving prediction about the need to perform a task speculatively or not, the work of the UMU researchers has focused on changing the events that happen in a computer so that they follow the initial prediction. In this way it is not necessary to restart the execution of the previously performed work. Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase “The best way to predict your future is to create it” is a great example of the motivation behind the ideas developed in this project.
“Let’s use an equation to understand the idea in a more informal way. Every morning, as he prepares to go to work, Echo predicts that it will be a sunny day and decides to take a walk to the office. Since he lives in Murcia, his prediction is often correct. But on days when it starts to rain during his walk, he has to go home, change clothes and take the car to go to the office, wasting precious time. But what if the rain could be delayed for a few minutes until Echo arrived at the office so that her decision would always be correct? This is the key to the project: if the future cannot be predicted correctly, why not change it so that it follows the initial prediction and thus saves time and work?” says Professor Ros Bardisa.
The UMU patents show that with only 67 bytes of storage space and minor changes in applications, it is possible to improve the performance of applications that have access to a lot of device memory on the one hand, and on the other hand to reduce the average time in running parallel applications, in addition to achieve the use of less energy.
These performance improvements are critical to advancing computer-intensive disciplines and applications, such as medicine, biology, chemistry, or environmental CCSS. Companies such as Intel, Apple and Huawei have expressed interest in the proprietary solutions, which were presented directly by the research team at the headquarters of these companies.
The ECHO project is part of an ERC Consolidator Grant awarded by the European Research Council, which started in 2019 and will run for a minimum of 5 years. The ERC projects are the most prestigious individual grants at European level, and this is the only resource of this type currently in force at UMU.
Source: La Verdad
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