This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

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Description
Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRA) are a promising fabric for improving the performance and power-efficiency of computing devices. CGRAs are composed of components that are well-optimized to execute loops and rotating register file is an example of such a component present in CGRAs. Due to the rotating nature of register indexes

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRA) are a promising fabric for improving the performance and power-efficiency of computing devices. CGRAs are composed of components that are well-optimized to execute loops and rotating register file is an example of such a component present in CGRAs. Due to the rotating nature of register indexes in rotating register file, it is very challenging, if at all possible, to hold and properly index memory addresses (pointers) and static values. In this Thesis, different structures for CGRA register files are investigated. Those structures are experimentally compared in terms of performance of mapped applications, design frequency, and area. It is shown that a register file that can logically be partitioned into rotating and non-rotating regions is an excellent choice because it imposes the minimum restriction on underlying CGRA mapping algorithm while resulting in efficient resource utilization.
ContributorsSaluja, Dipal (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
A benchmark suite that is representative of the programs a processor typically executes is necessary to understand a processor's performance or energy consumption characteristics. The first contribution of this work addresses this need for mobile platforms with MobileBench, a selection of representative smartphone applications. In smartphones, like any other

A benchmark suite that is representative of the programs a processor typically executes is necessary to understand a processor's performance or energy consumption characteristics. The first contribution of this work addresses this need for mobile platforms with MobileBench, a selection of representative smartphone applications. In smartphones, like any other portable computing systems, energy is a limited resource. Based on the energy characterization of a commercial widely-used smartphone, application cores are found to consume a significant part of the total energy consumption of the device. With this insight, the subsequent part of this thesis focuses on the portion of energy that is spent to move data from the memory system to the application core's internal registers. The primary motivation for this work comes from the relatively higher power consumption associated with a data movement instruction compared to that of an arithmetic instruction. The data movement energy cost is worsened esp. in a System on Chip (SoC) because the amount of data received and exchanged in a SoC based smartphone increases at an explosive rate. A detailed investigation is performed to quantify the impact of data movement

on the overall energy consumption of a smartphone device. To aid this study, microbenchmarks that generate desired data movement patterns between different levels of the memory hierarchy are designed. Energy costs of data movement are then computed by measuring the instantaneous power consumption of the device when the micro benchmarks are executed. This work makes an extensive use of hardware performance counters to validate the memory access behavior of microbenchmarks and to characterize the energy consumed in moving data. Finally, the calculated energy costs of data movement are used to characterize the portion of energy that MobileBench applications spend in moving data. The results of this study show that a significant 35% of the total device energy is spent in data movement alone. Energy is an increasingly important criteria in the context of designing architectures for future smartphones and this thesis offers insights into data movement energy consumption.
ContributorsPandiyan, Dhinakaran (Author) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Thesis advisor) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being used in many safety-critical applications. Due to the important role in virtually every aspect of human life, it is crucial to make sure that a CPS works properly before its deployment. However, formal verification of CPS is a computationally hard problem. Therefore, lightweight verification methods

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being used in many safety-critical applications. Due to the important role in virtually every aspect of human life, it is crucial to make sure that a CPS works properly before its deployment. However, formal verification of CPS is a computationally hard problem. Therefore, lightweight verification methods such as testing and monitoring of the CPS are considered in the industry. The formal representation of the CPS requirements is a challenging task. In addition, checking the system outputs with respect to requirements is a computationally complex problem. In this dissertation, these problems for the verification of CPS are addressed. The first method provides a formal requirement analysis framework which can find logical issues in the requirements and help engineers to correct the requirements. Also, a method is provided to detect tests which vacuously satisfy the requirement because of the requirement structure. This method is used to improve the test generation framework for CPS. Finally, two runtime verification algorithms are developed for off-line/on-line monitoring with respect to real-time requirements. These monitoring algorithms are computationally efficient, and they can be used in practical applications for monitoring CPS with low runtime overhead.
ContributorsDokhanchi, Adel (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
General-purpose processors propel the advances and innovations that are the subject of humanity’s many endeavors. Catering to this demand, chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) and general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have seen many high-performance innovations in their architectures. With these advances, the memory subsystem has become the performance- and energy-limiting aspect of CMPs

General-purpose processors propel the advances and innovations that are the subject of humanity’s many endeavors. Catering to this demand, chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) and general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have seen many high-performance innovations in their architectures. With these advances, the memory subsystem has become the performance- and energy-limiting aspect of CMPs and GPGPUs alike. This dissertation identifies and mitigates the key performance and energy-efficiency bottlenecks in the memory subsystem of general-purpose processors via novel, practical, microarchitecture and system-architecture solutions.

Addressing the important Last Level Cache (LLC) management problem in CMPs, I observe that LLC management decisions made in isolation, as in prior proposals, often lead to sub-optimal system performance. I demonstrate that in order to maximize system performance, it is essential to manage the LLCs while being cognizant of its interaction with the system main memory. I propose ReMAP, which reduces the net memory access cost by evicting cache lines that either have no reuse, or have low memory access cost. ReMAP improves the performance of the CMP system by as much as 13%, and by an average of 6.5%.

Rather than the LLC, the L1 data cache has a pronounced impact on GPGPU performance by acting as the bandwidth filter for the rest of the memory subsystem. Prior work has shown that the severely constrained data cache capacity in GPGPUs leads to sub-optimal performance. In this thesis, I propose two novel techniques that address the GPGPU data cache capacity problem. I propose ID-Cache that performs effective cache bypassing and cache line size selection to improve cache capacity utilization. Next, I propose LATTE-CC that considers the GPU’s latency tolerance feature and adaptively compresses the data stored in the data cache, thereby increasing its effective capacity. ID-Cache and LATTE-CC are shown to achieve 71% and 19.2% speedup, respectively, over a wide variety of GPGPU applications.

Complementing the aforementioned microarchitecture techniques, I identify the need for system architecture innovations to sustain performance scalability of GPG- PUs in the face of slowing Moore’s Law. I propose a novel GPU architecture called the Multi-Chip-Module GPU (MCM-GPU) that integrates multiple GPU modules to form a single logical GPU. With intelligent memory subsystem optimizations tailored for MCM-GPUs, it can achieve within 7% of the performance of a similar but hypothetical monolithic die GPU. Taking a step further, I present an in-depth study of the energy-efficiency characteristics of future MCM-GPUs. I demonstrate that the inherent non-uniform memory access side-effects form the key energy-efficiency bottleneck in the future.

In summary, this thesis offers key insights into the performance and energy-efficiency bottlenecks in CMPs and GPGPUs, which can guide future architects towards developing high-performance and energy-efficient general-purpose processors.
ContributorsArunkumar, Akhil (Author) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Thesis advisor) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Bolotin, Evgeny (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018