Key Techniques Research Of Stream Architecture

Stream architecture is an emerging architecture. Stream architecture operates on data streams, provides multiple-level bandwidth hierarchy and makes ALU arrays execute with full loads. Stream programming model exposes the parallelism and locality of stream applications in a manner that is well matched to the capabilities of modern VLSI technology. Research shows that programmable stream processor can achieve high performance, which is comparable to special processor. Compared to traditional general purpose processor, stream processor owns simple instruction control and storage logic with a large amount of programmable arithmetic units and programmable communication channels. It is suited for VLSI technology's development trend. However, stream architecture's research is in the primary level. Many key technologies need to be studied.This paper studies deeply on stream architecture, including stream processing characteristics, stream programming model, pipeline architecture, kernel-level hardware architecture, stream-level hardware architecture, special execution mechanism and system board et al. Then we designed and completed MASA-I SOPC system. Based on it, this paper studies the scalability of stream architecture. The analysis includes VLSI cost, storage levels and the effect to stream application. A new multiple dimension scalable stream architecture (MASA-II) was presented and designed. Since stream processor depends deeply on software, this paper studied the cooperating method between cores. A cooperating mechanism between multiple cores based quasi-dynamic scheduling method is completed. We use share memory between scalar core and stream core to reduce memory reference. The cooperating mechanism is a base of deep research. This paper presents a detailed study of porting the fluid dynamics calculation with 2D Lagrange and Euler Method (IAPCM Benchmarks) to MASA stream processor. We studied some problems about scientific computing mapping on stream processor. The performance was analyzed. At last several benchmarks for intensive processing applications, such as signal processing, media processing, scientific computing, have been mapped on MASA (with single core and multiple cores) and evaluated. Our research in benchmarks covers extensive experiments in the MASA hardware design and software systems. Moreover, we will be honored to provide feedback to the MASA architecture and compilation teams.Experiment results shows that MASA's potential to deliver high performance for intensive computing domain. The result also demonstrates that MASA-II (multiple dimension scalable stream architecture) has good scalability and is suitable for broader stream application domains and VLSI technology trend.Stream Architecture is the one of the best architectures for high performance computing.