SCRATCH: An End-to-End Application-Aware So-GPGPU Architecture and Trimming Tool

Applying advanced signal processing and artificial intelligence algorithms is often constrained by power and energy consumption limitations, in high performance and embedded, cyber-physical and super-computing devices and systems. Although Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) helped to mitigate the throughput-per-Watt performance problem in many compute-intensive applications, dealing more efficiently with the autonomy requirements of intelligent systems demands power-oriented customized architectures that are specially tuned for each application, preferably without manual redesign of the entire hardware and capable of supporting legacy code. Hence, this work proposes a new SCRATCH framework that aims at automatically identifying the specific requirements of each application kernel, regarding instruction set and computing unit demands, allowing for the generation of application-specific and FPGA-implementable trimmed-down GPU-inspired architectures. The work is based on an improved version of the original MIAOW system (here named MIAOW2.0), which is herein extended to support a set of 156 instructions and enhanced to provide a fast prefetch memory system and a dual-clock domain. Experimental results with 17 highly relevant benchmarks, using integer and floating-point arithmetic, demonstrate that we have been able to achieve an average of 140× speedup and 115× higher energy-efficiency levels (instructions-per-Joule) when compared to the original MIAOW system, and a 2.4× speedup and 2.1× energy-efficiency gains compared against our optimized version without pruning.