Innovation Award Winner

Sun developed the OpenSPARC Awards program to foster innovation on a global level and recognize the most interesting initiatives within open source communities. The winners range from professors and students in academia to developers working in the industry, all of whom demonstrate extraordinary creativity and collaboration leading to some outstanding innovations in the OpenSPARC community.

A student of Dr. Arindam Mukherjee, Datta’s research areas includes Modeling of Multicore Architectures, Design Exploration and Performance Optimization.

An overview of Datta’s prize-winning OpenSPARC research follows:

CMT Architecture Simulator for Performance, Energy and aRea Analysis (CASPER), which targets the UltraSPARC T1 multicore CMT architecture, with each core having multiple hardware strands (multi-threads) or virtual processing units which can execute in parallel. CASPER is a multi-threaded (and hence, fast) parameterized cycle-accurate architecture simulator, which captures the states of (i) the functional blocks, sub-blocks and register files in all the cores, (ii) shared memories and (iii) interconnect network, every clock cycle. Architectural parameters such as number of cores, number of hardware threads per core (virtual processors), register file size and organization, branch predictor buffer size and prediction algorithm, translation lookaside buffer (TLB) size, cache-size and coherence protocols, memory hierarchy and management, and instruction queue sizes, to name a few, are parameterized in CASPER. The processor architecture is a hierarchical design containing functional blocks, such as Instruction Fetch Unit (IFU), Decode and Branch Unit (DBU), Execution Unit (EXU) and Load-Store Unit (LSU). These blocks again contain functional sub-blocks, such as L1 Instruction Cache, Load Miss Queue, Translation Lookaside Buffer, and so on. The shared memory subsystem can be configured to consist of either L2 cache or both L2 and L3 unified caches. The interconnection network is also parameterized. In the first release, the possible choices are crossbar switch (similar to UltraSPARC T1), and token-based ring network.