Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Computers What does the HP Teramac have to do with the moletronics What does the HP Teramac have to do with the moletronics newcommand{spacedouble}{renewcommand{baselinestretch}{1.40}Hugenormalsize} newcommand{spacesingle}{renewcommand{baselinestretch}{1.0}Hugenormalsize} %renewcommand{thesection}{Roman{section}} % The following is to change Reference to Bibliography %renewcommand{thebibliography}[1]{{section*{Bibliography}}list % {[arabic{enumi}]}{setlength{itemsep}{-0.05in}settowidthlabelwidth{[#1]}leftmarginlabelwidth % defnewblock{hskip .11em plus .33em minus .07em} % sloppyclubpenalty4000widowpenalty4000 title{{bf What does the HP Teramac have to do with Moletronics?}} Recently, one of the main microprocessor manufacturer Intel Corp. announced that a bug within a small number of their Coppermine microprocessors had been found. And this was not the first time Intel presented similar announcement. Also, another CPU giant AMD has been suffered from design and manufacture defect in their The traditional paradigm for computer hardware is to design the specific circuit including the gates, wires and the way they connected, and built it perfectly. Perfection of the components is the baseline of modern computer hardware--a single design or manufacture defect can cause the entire system crashed. It is thought that with the chip's increasing of complexity and shrinking in size, the defect is inevitable, either in design or manufacture process. An observation that is sometimes called Moore's second law alleged that the cost of integrated circuits factories are escalating exponentially with time for attempting to keep perfection of chips. Then by the year 2012, a single fabrication plants could cost up to 30 billion dollars.cite As we know, the next generation electronic technology--Moletronics is a promising way to design faster and more powerful computers. Computers by moletronics technology is typically constructed by random chemical and physical procedures, thus the defect in final product is inevitable. For Moletronics, it is even harder and economically infeasible to keep all its component perfect. It is seemed that even though finally we can make out a prototype of Moletronics computer, the high price will keep most of the users The resolution to this problem may come from a newly developed prototype supercomputer in HP, called Teramac. Although the architecture of the prototype is built on conventional electronic method. Its principles and approaches will apply a great impact on The name "Teramac" comes from the word "Tera" which means "Trillion" or ${10^{12}}$, and "mac" from "Multiple Architecture Computer". The key point that Teramac differs from conventional computer architecture is its tolerance to defect. It is evaluated that there are 200,000 defects in this computer, but surely it works! And yet it could run in some of its configurations 100 times faster than a single processor workstation. The key property of Teramac is its "software-changeable architecture" feature. That is to say we can use code or instruction to change the logic composition of Teramac. It is why we call it "Custom Configurable Computer (CCC)". Teramac consists of 864 identical chips named "field programmable gate array" (FPGA). Each FPGA contains a large quantity of computation units and a flexible connection network, which are called LUTs and Crossbar, respectively. All the LUTs are identical for their physical structure and can implement different logic function. So they do not consist of digital logical component like AND gate, buy rather with memory. "LUT", whose name comes from Look-Up Table, is a 64-bit memory block that hold 6 address lines as input and one bit output according to the memory's content. Then, depending on the content of the memory, LUT can perform ${2^{64}}$ kinds of logic functions. There are 65,536 LUTs in the Teramac. About 30% of the FPGAs(256 out of 864) are contributed to the computation units--LUTs, and others are used for inner connecting and signal routing. That is the function of Crossbar. Crossbar can be considered as a wiring network whose connection can be dynamically changed. An Crossbar network contains two planes of crossbars. one is the date line crossbar, the other is the address line crossbar. Actually, data line crossbar is an array of switches connecting the cross of each rows and column. Memory line crossbar contains an array of memory bits that can control the status of each switches at the corresponding position. Then we can manipulate the data line connection by setting the memory plane with different bits. So the basic components of the Teramac could all be programmable. The use of FPGAs allow us to load a desired custom architecture onto Teramac through configuration of the memory. Teramac uses a 300-megabit word called very long instruction word (VLIW) for the presentation of desired architecture, most of which are bits for Crossbar section{Why Teramac architecture helps to Moletronics} The capacity of fault tolerance of Teramac comes from its redundant design. Considering a Crossbar network. There are couple of pathways between two arbitrary cross section. Even if the network has a physical defect in its circuits, we could also find a different pathway, thus, a different VLIW to bypass the defect. The innate redundancy and defect tolerance property of Teramac is very important to the Moletronics technique. Producing the defect free products is costly. As an example, it is always far more expensive for purchasing a perfectly reliable disk than a redundant disk array. For the Moletronics products, the situation is even worse. Building the perfect product, in some aspect, is impossible. Thus, using the Teramac architecture to build a defected but workable system is a feasible way. Furthermore, beside defect tolerance, Teramac also contributes other advantages to Moletronics. We learned that Teramac has a homogeneous physical structure. The LUTs and Crossbars a all the same in each FPGAs. Undoubtedly, it will great reduce cost of the The Teramac illustrates a totally different paradigm in system design. Comparing to traditional method, it tremendously decrease the cost of the system and make it more flexible. James R. Heath, Philip J. Kuekes, Gregory S. Snider and R. Stanley Williams, A Defect-Tolerant Computer Architecture: Opportunities for Nanotecjnology, in {em SCIENCE }, Vol.280 June, pp.1716-1721, W. Bruce Culbertson etc. The Teramac Custom Computer: Extending the Limites with Defect Tolerance, in {em Proceedings of the IEEE Internation Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSL System W. Bruce Culbertson etc., Defect Tolerance on the Teramac Custom Computer, in {em Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on FPGAs for Bibliography: Word Count: 1083
Copyright © 1998-2008 College Term Papers, INC All Rights Reserved. DMCA Notifications and Requests