posted: 19 April 96
PAWS'96
I-ACOMA is designed to address some of the most important challenges that architects will face in the next two decades, namely the widening gap between the speed of multi GHz processors and the much slower cache hierarchy, memory and network subsystems, the increasing underutilization of the large number of transistors that can be embedded on a processor chip, and the disappointingly poor machine utilization in many key applications like sparse computations and database workloads. To address these issues, I-ACOMA includes a very aggressive memory hierarchy, multithreaded superscalar processors, and architectural support for sparse computations and databases. On the software side, the code running on I-ACOMA is generated by a compiler that automatically parallelizes Fortran 90 programs. The compiler exposes both loop-and instruction-level parallelism. In addition, it generates data forward directives. Finally, on the applications side, while I-ACOMA is a general-purpose machine, we focus on two sets of challenging applications, namely sparse computations and database applications.
comments to: Larry Picha PAWS'96
posted: 19 April 96