
.............................................................................................................................................. ................ ................ ................ .................. ..........
G
ODSON
-T: A
N
E
FFICIENT
M
ANY
-C
ORE
P
ROCESSOR
E
XPLORING
T
HREAD
-L
EVEL
P
ARALLELISM
.............................................................................................................................................. ................ ................ ................ .................. ..........
GODSON-T IS A RESEARCH MANY-CORE PROCESSOR DESIGNED FOR PARALLEL SCIENTIFIC
COMPUTING THAT DELIVERS EFFICIENT PERFORMANCE AND FLEXIBLE PROGRAMMABILITY
SIMULTANEOUSLY
.IT ALSO HAS MANY FEATURES TO ACHIEVE HIGH EFFICIENCY FOR
ON
-CHIP RESOURCE UTILIZATION, SUCH AS A REGION-BASED CACHE COHERENCE
PROTOCOL
, DATA TRANSFER AGENTS, AND HARDWARE-SUPPORTED SYNCHRONIZATION
MECHANISMS
.FINALLY, IT ALSO FEATURES A HIGHLY EFFICIENT RUNTIME SYSTEM,
A PTHREADS-LIKE PROGRAMMING MODEL, AND VERSATILE PARALLEL LIBRARIES, WHICH
MAKE THIS MANY
-CORE DESIGN FLEXIBLY PROGRAMMABLE.
......Although various many-core pro-
cessors, such as Tilera’s TILE64,
1
IBM’s
Power7,
2
AMD’s Opteron,
3
and the
SPARC64,
4
provide t remendous comp uta-
tional capability, programmers still face the
grand challenge of expressing and exploiting
parallelism correctly and efficiently. Paralleli-
zation always requires significant program-
ming efforts. Even when a parallel program
works correctly, performance tuning can be
daunting. Parallel programming brings
many complex problems that are highly re-
lated to performance issues: managing con-
flicts in accessing shared resources,
synchronizing disparate threads, and so on.
In many cases, significant programming
efforts can’t be transformed into perfor-
mance gain. This problem is unlikely to
ever be perfectly resolve d by software pro-
gramming infrastructure alone.
Therefore, the Institute of Computing
Technology (ICT) of the Chinese Academy
of Sciences (CAS) has developed a many-
core processor called Godson-T, which pro-
vides a widely used programming paradigm
and highly efficient architectural support
for multithreaded programs. Thus, it frees
programmers from concentrating on efficient
parallel execution and lets them focus on
expressing parallelism. The Godson-T archi-
tecture supports two fundamental multi-
threading operations: data communication
andthreadsynchronization.Atthesame
time, it provides a multithread programming
environment and a runtime system.
Godson-T architecture overview
As Figure 1 shows, the Godson-T processor
is a many-core processor with 64 homoge-
neous, in-order, and dual-issue processing
[3B2-9] mmi2012020038.3d 12/3/012 14:55 Page 38
Dongrui Fan
Hao Zhang
Da Wang
Xiaochun Ye
Fenglong Song
Guojie Li
Ninghui Sun
Institute of Computing
Technology, Chinese
Academy of Sciences
..............................................................
38
Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1732/12/$31.00
c
2012 IEEE