arch-beerWeekly Reading |
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Ahmad is presenting... ParallAX: An Architecture for Real-Time Physics T.Y. Yeh, P. Faloutsos, S.J. Patel, G. Reinman ISCA'07 Paper (GT internal only) Future interactive entertainment applications will feature the physical simulation of thousands of interacting objects using explosions, breakable objects, and cloth effects. While these applications require a tremendous amount of performance to satisfy the minimum frame rate of 30 FPS, there is a dramatic amount of parallelism in future physics workloads.How will future physics architectures leverage parallelism to achieve the real-time constraint?. We propose and characterize a set of forward-looking benchmarks to represent future physics load and explore the design space of future physics processors. In response to the demand of this workload, we demonstrate an architecture with a set of powerful cores and caches to provide performance for the serial and coarse-grain parallel components of physics simulation, along with a flexible set of simple cores to exploit fine-grain parallelism. Our architecture combines intelligent, application-aware L2 management with dynamic coupling/allocation of simple cores to complex cores. Furthermore,we perform sensitivity analysis on interconnect alternatives to determine how tightly to couple these cores. |