Advanced Topics in Computer Architecture

Reading List

Note: All Week 1 papers are not for assessment. You should not submit an essay on the topic of these papers.

Week 1: Trends in Computer Architecture

• Clock Rate versus IPC: The End of the Road for Conventional Microarchitectures Agarwal, Hrishikesh, Keckler and Burger, ISCA, June 2000.
  [ IEEE Xplore ]
• Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling Esmaeilzadeh et al, IEEE Micro, 32:2, May-June 2012.
  [ IEEE Xplore ]
• The Accelerator Wall: Limits to Chip Specialization Fuchs and Wentzlaff, HPCA 2019.
  [ IEEE Xplore ]

Other optional material for week 1

• A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture Hennessy and Patterson, Communications of the ACM, Feb. 2019, 62(2), pp. 48-60 (Turing Lecture)
• Sophie Wilson, "The Future of Microprocessors", 2020 Wheeler Lecture, University of Cambridge, May 2020

Week 2: State-of-the-art Processor Design

• BROOM: An Open-Source Out-of-Order Processor With Resilient Low-Voltage Operation in 28nm CMOS Celio, Chiu, Asanovic, Nikolic and Patterson. Hot Chips 30, 2019.
  [IEEE Xplore ]
• Inside 6th-Generation Intel Core: New Microarchitecture Code-Named Skylake Doweck et al, IEEE Micro, vol. 37, 2017
  [IEEE Xplore ]
• The Celerity Open-Source 511-Core RISC-V Tiered Accelerator Fabric: Fast Architectures and Design Methodologies for Fast Chips Davidson et al. IEEE Micro, 38(2), March-April, 2019
  [IEEE Xplore ]

Other optional material for week 2

• Samsung M3 Processor Rupley, Burgess, Grayson, Zuraski, IEEE Micro, 39(2), March-April, 2019
  [IEEE Xplore ]

Week 3: Memory system design

• Linearizing Irregular Memory Accesses for Improved Correlated Prefetching Jain and Lin, MICRO 2013
  [ACM Digital Library]
• Best-Offset Hardware Prefetching Michaud, HPCA 2016
  [IEEE Xplore] [Version with figure 6 fixed]
• Minnow: Lightweight Offload Engines for Worklist Management and Worklist-Directed Prefetching Zhang, Ma, Thomson and Chiou, ASPLOS 2018
  [ACM Digital Library]

Other optional material for week 3

• Continuous Runahead: Transparent Hardware Acceleration for Memory Intensive Workloads Hashemi, Mutlu and Patt, MICRO 2016
  [ACM Digital Library]
• Meet the Walkers: Accelerating Index Traversals for In-Memory Databases Kocberber, Grot, Picorel, Falsafi, Lim and Ranganathan
  [ACM Digital Library]

Week 4: Hardware reliability

• StageWeb: Interweaving Pipeline Stages into a Wearout and Variation Tolerant CMP Fabric Gupta, Ansari, Feng and Mahlke, DSN 2010
  [IEEE Xplore]
• Reunion: Complexity-Effective Multicore Redundancy Smolens, Gold, Falsafi and Hoe, MICRO 2006
  [ACM Digital Library]
• Utilizing Dynamically Coupled Cores to Form a Resilient Chip Multiprocessor LaFrieda, İpek, Martínez and Manohar, DSN 2007
  [IEEE Xplore]

Other optional material for week 4

• Architectural Core Salvaging in a Multi-Core Processor for Hard-Error Tolerance Powell, Biswas, Gupta and Mukherjee, ISCA 2009
  [ACM Digital Library]
• Relax: An Architectural Framework for Software Recovery of Hardware Faults De Kruijf, Nomura and Sankaralingam, ISCA 2010
  [ACM Digital Library]

Week 5: Specification, verification and test

• ISA specification & verification:
• Mandatory: Who Guards the Guards? Formal validation of the Arm v8-m architecture specification, OOPSLA 2017
  [ACM Digital Library]
• ISA Semantics for ARMv8-A, RISC-V, and CHERI-MIPS, POPL 2019
  [Open Access]
• Sail RISC-V docs:
  [GitHub]
• Instruction test generation:
• Mandatory: Genesys-Pro: Innovations in Test Program Generation for Functional Processor Verification, IBM Research, IEEE Design and Test 2004
  [IEEExplore]
• Randomised testing of a microprocessor model using SMT-solver state generation, 2015
  [Science Direct]
• RISC-V torture tests:
  [GitHub]

Other optional material for week 5

• RISC-V tests:
  [GitHub]
• RISC-V formal framework:
  [Open Access Slides]

Week 6: Security 1: CHERI

• Background:An Introduction to CHERI
  [Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-941]
• Efficient Tagged Memory:
  [local PDF]
• CHERI: A Hybrid Capability-System Architecture for Scalable Software Compartmentalization:
  [local PDF]
• CHERIvoke: Characterising Pointer Revocation using CHERI Capabilities for Temporal Memory Safety:
  [local PDF]

Optional material for week 6

• Cornucopia: Temporal Safety for CHERI Heaps
  [local PDF]
• CHERI Concentrate: Practical Compressed Capabilities
  [local PDF]
• Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions: CHERI Instruction-Set Architecture (Version 8)
  [Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-927]
• [CHERI publications list]

Week 7: Security 2: Speculative execution attacks

• Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution
  [Open PDF]
• Example industry response: ARM white paper: Cache Speculation Side-channels
  [ARM white paper]
• Research into hardware mitigations: MI6: Secure Enclaves in a Speculative Out-of-Order Processor
  [PDF on Arxiv]

Optional material for week 7

• https://spectreattack.com/
• https://meltdownattack.com/
• https://foreshadowattack.eu/

Week 8: Hardware accelerators and accelerators for machine learning

• Pushing the limits of accelerator efficiency while retaining programmability, Nowatzki, Gangadhar, Sankaralingam and Wright, HPCA 2016


• Eyeriss: A spatial architecture for energy-efficient dataflow for convolutional neural networks, Chen, Emer and Sze, ISCA 2016


• EIE: Efficient Inference Engine on Compressed Deep Neural Network, Han, Liu, Mao, Pu, Pedram, Horowitz and Dally, ISCA 2016
  [VIDEO] Song Han presenting work at ISCA

Other optional/background material for week 8

• NullHop: A Flexible Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on Sparse Representations of Feature Maps
  Aimar et al, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. 30(3): 644-656 (2019)


• Survey of Machine Learning Accelerators
  Reuther et al, Proc. of IEEE-HPEC conference, Waltham, MA, September 21-25, 2020


• Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks: A Tutorial and Survey
  Sze, Chen, Yang, Emer, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 105, No. 12, Dec. 2017


• Roofline: An Insightful Visual Performance Model for Floating-Point Programs and Multicore Architectures Williams, Waterman and Patterson, Communications of the ACM, vol. 52, Issue 4, April 2009, pp 65-76.

Lecture Slides

Seminar 1 - Trends in Computer Architecture

Seminar 1 - Processor Design (background)

Seminar 2 - Prefetching

Seminar 3 - Reliability

Seminar 4 - Specification, verification and test

Seminar 5 - Secure processors 1: CHERI

Seminar 5 - Secure processors 2: Speculative execution attacks

Seminar 8 - Accelerators