Required Reading

Due:11/28/2016

You may do this reading assignment in groups of up to 4 and submit one writeup for the entire group (you can also just read and hand your answers in individually). Please be very brief in your answers — I’m really just looking for bullet points.

Please read the paper below and prepare for class by answering the following questions. These questions are meant to help you focus in reading the paper and not waste too much time on it. I encourage you to discuss things with one another before class. Please submit a single write-up for each group that discuss the paper through blackboard. Keep things short — just write down bullet points. One of the reasons I’m making this paper required reading is because it is not a traditional architecture paper and I want you to try and read it as an architect looking at a more circuit paper (the recommended paper at the end is completely circuits, but still relevant and interesting).

  • Kayvon Fatahalian , Timothy J. Knight , Mike Houston , Mattan Erez , Daniel Reiter Horn , Larkhoon Leem , Ji Young Park , Mattan Erez , Manman Ren , Alex Aiken , William J. Dally and Pat Hanrahan (2006) Sequoia: programming the memory hierarchy. In SC ‘06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing.. ACM, page 83. ((URL)) (BibTeX)

Questions (compare and contrast the two papers):

  1. List the main problems (there are several) Sequoia attempts to address.
  2. List a few important limitations of Sequoia
  3. Will Sequoia work well for programming a GPU? How about KNL?


Other material

We will discuss the paper below too so it would be good if you could at least read.

  • Bauer, Michael , Treichler, Sean , Slaughter, Elliott and Aiken, Alex (2012) Legion: expressing locality and independence with logical regions. In Proceedings of the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis., page 66. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • You may find the Legion webpage helpful.