Accelerator-rich architectures: Opportunities and progresses

To drastically improve energy efficiency, we believe future processors need to go beyond parallelization and provide architecture support for customization, enabling systems to adapt to different application domains. In particular, we believe future architectures will make extensive use of accelerators to significantly reduce energy consumption. Such architectures present many new challenges and opportunities, such as accelerator synthesis, scheduling, sharing, virtualization, memory hierarchy optimization, and efficient compilation and runtime support. With respect to these areas, we review the progress of our research in the Center for Domain-Specific Computing (supported by the NSF Expeditions-in-Computing Award), and discuss ongoing work and additional challenges.