IRES: Track I: Collaborative Research: Supporting FSU and MTU Student Research with NTNU Faculty on Automatic Improvement of Application Performance

When the technology for computers advance and programs execute faster, more computer applications become possible. This project will enable Florida State University (FSU) and Michigan Technology University (MTU) students to visit the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) to conduct research that will allow the performance and energy efficiency of computer applications to be automatically improved.

Over the three years of this project, 16 FSU and MTU students (in cohorts of five, five, and six) will visit NTNU, which is in Trondheim, Norway, for a period of 10 weeks during May, June, and July. While in residence, the students will work closely with the faculty, postdoctoral associates, and graduate students in the research groups of Professors Magnus Sjalander and Magnus Jahre who are affiliated with the Computer Architecture Laboratory (CAL) at NTNU.

The participating FSU and MTU students will not only increase their research knowledge, but will also become more globally engaged and better prepared to work in a culturally diverse, international environment.

The era of improving processor performance without innovations in computer architecture or compilers is over since increasing the clock rate for computers has not been possible in recent years due to thermal limitations. However, manually modifying programs to efficiently exploit computer architectures is time consuming, error prone, and not portable to other systems.

The most effective way to improve application performance is to automatically exploit architectural features without the intervention of the application developers. Our focus will be on automatically achieving high performance and energy efficiency by generating code to exploit existing and proposed architectural features at the machine instruction level.

We propose to develop the compilation tools to facilitate the process of automatically generating code to exploit

these proposed architectural features and to develop the simulation tools to evaluate the impact on both performance and energy efficiency.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.