Analyzing Behavior Specialized Acceleration
Tony Nowatzki, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam · 2016
Hardware specialization has become a promising paradigm for overcoming the inefficiencies of general purpose microprocessors. Of significant interest are Behavioral Specialized Accelerators (BSAs), which are designed to efficiently execute code with only certain properties, but remain largely configurable or programmable. The most important strength of BSAs -- their ability to target a wide variety of codes -- also makes their interactions and analysis complex, raising the following questions: can multiple BSAs be composed synergistically, what are their interactions with the general purpose core, and what combinations favor which workloads? From a methodological standpoint, BSAs are also challenging, as they each require ISA development, compiler and assembler extensions, and either simulator or RTL models.