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3 weeks ago by Hewlett-Packard (HP)CAPRI: Prediction of Compaction-Adequacy for Handling Control-Divergence in GPGPU Architectures
Wide SIMD-based GPUs have evolved into a promising platform for running general purpose workloads. Current programmable GPUs allow even code with irregular control to execute well on their SIMD pipelines. To do this, each SIMD lane is considered to execute a logical thread where hardware ensures that control flow is accurate by automatically applying masked execution. The masked execution, however, often degrades performance because the issue slots of masked lanes are wasted. This degradation can be mitigated by dynamically compacting multiple unmasked threads into a single SIMD unit. This paper proposes a fundamentally new approach to branch compaction that avoids the unnecessary synchronization required by previous techniques and that only stalls threads that are likely to benefit from compaction.
3 weeks ago by Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersTaking a unified approach to data management
Enterprise IT leaders are wrestling with many of the same challenges as they seek to extend virtualisation while preparing for the coming digital deluge. They are looking for storage system and storage management solutions that improve the use of existing IT assets while also providing the flexibility to meet future needs. Meeting these objectives, however, requires more than just identifying the right use case and selecting the right solution. This IDC report looks at controlling data and reducing storage complexity with unified storage management, looking specifically at: - Reducing amount of work required to handle day-to-day storage management - Giving storage administrators better insight and visibility - Providing a service level-based approach to management tasks
4 weeks ago by HitachiProduct analysis: Hitachi Unified Storage 100 series
Despite the weak world economy, the market for storage subsystems is not showing any indications of slowing down. This report from Josh Krischer and Associates looks at storage requirements and challenges in a weakened economy, with a focus on Hitachi's mid-range storage platform HUS 100 series. The report focuses on how the subsystems address: - Availability and business continuity - Scalability - Performance - Advanced functionality
4 weeks ago by HitachiGrafting Energy-Harvesting Leaves onto the Sensornet Tree
The authors study the problem of augmenting battery-powered sensornet trees with energy-harvesting leaf nodes. Their results show that leaf nodes that are smaller in size than today's typical battery-powered sensors can harvest enough energy from ambient sources to acquire and transmit sensor readings every minute, even under poor lighting conditions. However, achieving this functionality, especially as leaf nodes scale in size, requires new platforms, protocols, and programming. Platforms must be designed around low-leakage operation, offer a richer power supply control interface for system software, and employ an unconventional energy storage hierarchy.
April 20th, 2012 by Association for Computing MachineryThe Dynamic Granularity Memory System
Chip multiprocessors enable continued performance scaling with increasingly many cores per chip. As the throughput of computation outpaces available memory bandwidth, however, the system bottleneck will shift to main memory. The authors present a memory system, the Dynamic Granularity Memory System (DGMS), which avoids unnecessary data transfers, saves power, and improves system performance by dynamically changing between fine and coarse-grained memory accesses. DGMS predicts memory access granularities dynamically in hardware, and does not require software or OS support. The dynamic operation of DGMS gives it superior ease of implementation and power efficiency relative to prior multi-granularity memory systems, while maintaining comparable levels of system performance.
April 15th, 2012 by Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersLane Decoupling for Improving the Timing-Error Resiliency of Wide-SIMD Architectures
A significant portion of the energy dissipated in modern integrated circuits is consumed by the overhead associated with timing guard-bands that ensure reliable execution. Timing speculation, where the pipeline operates at an unsafe voltage with any rare errors detected and resolved by the architecture, has been demonstrated to significantly improve the energy-efficiency of scalar processor designs. Unfortunately, applying the same timing-speculative approach to wide-SIMD architectures, such as those used in highly-efficient GPUs, may not provide similar gains. In this paper, the authors make two important contributions. The first is a set of models describing a parametrized general error probability function that is based on measurements of a fabricated chip and the expected efficiency benefits of timing speculation in a SIMD context.
April 15th, 2012 by Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersCache Craftiness for Fast Multicore Key-Value Storage
The authors present Masstree, a fast key-value database designed for SMP machines. Masstree keeps all data in memory. Its main data structure is a trie-like concatenation of B+-trees, each of which handles a fixed-length slice of a variable-length key. This structure effectively handles arbitrary-length possibly-binary keys, including keys with long shared prefixes. B+- tree fan-out was chosen to minimize total DRAM delay when descending the tree and prefetching each tree node. Lookups use optimistic concurrency control, a read-copy-update-like technique, and do not write shared data structures; updates lock only affected nodes.
April 13th, 2012 by Association for Computing MachineryUniversally Composable Key-Management
The authors present the first key-management functionality in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. It allows the enforcement of a wide range of security policies and can be extended by diverse key usage operations with no need to repeat the security proof. They illustrate its use by proving an implementation of a Security API secure with respect to arbitrary key-usage operations and explore a proof technique that allows the storage of cryptographic keys externally, a novel development in the UC framework.
April 10th, 2012 by INRIAWith Enhanced POWER7 Systems, IBM Raises the Ceiling, Again
As vendors abandon the UNIX market, IBM continues its commitment to AIX and POWER7 components on Power Systems. And with its recent architectural upgrades, its even redefining performance. Read the Clipper Group white paper and see how POWER7s faster processors accelerate the delivery of applications and services, and improve the utilization of resources.
April 10th, 2012 by IBM
