Innovation New Jersey
  • Home
  • Our Coalition
    • Contact Us
  • News
  • Resources
    • State Supports
    • Federal Supports
    • Higher Ed Supports
  • Join Us

Innovation News

Everything Innovation. Everything New Jersey.
Follow us and stay connected.

Princeton University Researchers Develop New Microchip that Demonstrates Efficiency, Scalable Design

9/16/2016

0 Comments

 
Princeton, NJ — Adam Hadhazy reports that Princeton University researchers have developed a new computer chip that promises to boost the performance of data centers that lie at the core of numerous online services such as email and social media.
 
The chip — called “Piton” after the metal spikes driven by rock climbers into mountainsides to aid in their ascent — was presented Aug. 23 at Hot Chips, a symposium on high-performance chips held in Cupertino, California.
 
Data centers — essentially giant warehouses packed with computer servers — support cloud-based services such as Gmail and Facebook, as well as store the staggeringly voluminous content available via the internet.
 
Yet the computer chips at the heart of the biggest servers that route and process information often differ little from the chips in smaller servers or everyday personal computers.
 
The Princeton researchers designed their chip specifically for massive computing systems. Piton could substantially increase processing speed while slashing energy usage.  
​The chip architecture is scalable — designs can be built that go from a dozen to several thousand cores, which are the independent processors that carry out the instructions in a computer program.
 
Also, the architecture enables thousands of chips to be connected into a single system containing millions of cores.
 
“With Piton, we really sat down and rethought computer architecture in order to build a chip specifically for data centers and the cloud,” said David Wentzlaff, a Princeton assistant professor of electrical engineering and associated faculty in the Department of Computer Science.
 
“The chip we’ve made is among the largest chips ever built in academia and it shows how servers could run far more efficiently and cheaply,” Wentzlaff said.
 
The unveiling of Piton is a culmination of years of effort by Wentzlaff and his students.
 
Michael McKeown, Wentzlaff’s graduate student, will present at Hot Chips. Mohammad Shahrad, a graduate student in Wentzlaff’s Princeton Parallel Group, said that creating “a physical piece of hardware in an academic setting is a rare and very special opportunity for computer architects.”
 
The current version of the Piton chip measures 6 millimeters by 6 millimeters.  The chip has more than 460 million transistors, each of which are as small as 32 nanometers — too small to be seen by anything but an electron microscope. The bulk of these transistors are contained in 25 cores.
 
Most personal computer chips have four or eight cores. In general, more cores mean faster processing times, so long as software ably exploits the hardware’s available cores to run operations in parallel.  
 
Therefore, computer manufacturers have turned to multi-core chips to squeeze further gains out of conventional approaches to computer hardware.
 
In recent years companies and academic institutions have produced chips with many dozens of cores — but the readily scalable architecture of Piton can enable thousands of cores on a single chip with half a billion cores in the data center, Wentzlaff said.
 
“What we have with Piton is really a prototype for future commercial server systems that could take advantage of a tremendous number of cores to speed up processing,” Wentzlaff said.
 
The Piton chip’s design focuses on exploiting commonality among programs running simultaneously on the same chip.
 
One method to do this is called execution drafting. It works very much like the drafting in bicycle racing, when cyclists conserve energy by riding behind a lead rider who cuts through the air, creating a slipstream.
 
At a data center, multiple users often run programs that rely on similar operations at the processor level.
 
The Piton chip’s cores can recognize these instances and execute identical instructions consecutively, so that they flow one after another, like a line of drafting cyclists. Doing so can increase energy efficiency by about 20 percent compared to a standard core, the researchers said.
 
For the full story, click here.
 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Do not miss a single innovative moment and sign up for our newsletter!
    Weekly updates


    Categories

    All
    3D Printing
    Academia
    Acquisitions
    Aerospace
    Agriculture
    AIDS
    Algae
    Alumni
    Animals
    Architecture
    Astrophysics
    Autism
    Awards
    Big Data
    Bioethics
    Biofuel
    Biomedical
    BioNJ
    Bioterrorism
    Bit Coins
    Brain Health
    Business
    Camden
    Cancer
    CCollege
    Cellular
    Centenary
    Chemistry
    ChooseNJ
    Climate Change
    Clinical Trials
    Cloud Tech
    Collaboration
    Computing
    Congress
    Coriell
    Council On Innovation
    Crowdfunding
    Cybersecurity
    DARPA
    Defense
    Degree
    Dementia
    Dental Health
    DOC
    DOD
    DOE
    Drew
    Drones
    Drug Creation
    Einstein's Alley
    Electricity
    Energy
    Engineering
    Entrepreneurship
    Environmental
    FAA
    Fairleigh Dickinson
    FDA
    Federal Budget
    Federal Government
    Federal Labs
    Federal Program
    Finance
    Food Science
    Fort Monmouth
    Fuel Cells
    Funding
    Genome
    Geography
    Geology
    Global Competition
    Google
    Governor Christie
    Grant
    Hackensack
    HackensackUMC
    Healthcare
    Health Care
    HHS
    HINJ
    Hospitals
    Immigration
    Incubator
    Infrastructure
    International
    Internet
    Investor
    IoT
    IP
    IT
    Jobs
    Johnson & Johnson
    K-12
    Kean
    Kessler
    Legislation
    Logistics
    Manufacturing
    Medical Devices
    Med School
    Mental Health
    Mentor
    Microorganisms
    Molecular Biology
    Montclair
    NAS
    Neuroscience
    Newark
    New Jersey
    NIFA
    NIH
    NIST
    NJBDA
    NJBIA
    NJ Chemistry Council
    NJCU
    NJDOLWD
    NJEDA
    NJEDge
    NJHF
    NJII
    NJIT
    NJMEP
    NJPAC
    NJPRO
    NJTC
    Nonprofit
    NSF
    OpEd
    Open Data
    OSHE
    OSTP
    Parasite
    Patents
    Paterson
    Patients
    Perth Amboy
    Pharma
    POTUS
    PPPL
    Princeton
    Prosthetics
    Ranking
    Rare Disease
    R&D Council
    Report
    Resiliency
    Rider
    Robotics
    Rowan
    Rutgers
    SBA
    Seton Hall
    Siemens
    Smart Car
    Smart Cities
    Software
    Solar
    Space
    SSTI
    Startup
    State Government
    STEM
    Stevens
    Stockton
    Subatomic
    Supports
    Sustainability
    Taxes
    TCNJ
    Teachers
    Telecom
    Therapy
    Thermodynamics
    Transportation
    Undergraduate
    USEDA
    Verizon
    Video Game
    Virtual Reality
    Water
    WHO
    William Paterson
    Women In STEM
    Workforce Development

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.