A Hardware-Software Symbiosis

Roland Piquepaille writes "We all want smaller and faster computers. Of course, this increases the complexity of the work of computer designers. But now, computer scientists from the University of Virginia are coming with a radical new idea which may revolutionize computer design. They've developed Tortola, a virtual interface that enables hardware and software to communicate and to solve problems together. This approach can be applied to get a better performance from a specific system. It also can be used in the areas of security or power consumption. And it soon could be commercialized with the help of IBM and Intel."

Comments

Links and a comment

[martyb]

Some Links:

• http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/profs/hazelwoo d.html Asst. Professor Kim Hazelwood's Home page at UVA
• http://www.tortolaproject.com/ - the Tortola Project home page

And a comment:

I'm not entirely thrilled with this idea of dynamically communicating between hardware and software. From what I got from TFA, the hardware would change dynamically based on feedback from the software. It seems to me that we already have plenty of trouble writing programs that work correctly when the hardware does not change... imagine trying to debug a program when the computer hardware is adapting to the changes in your code. (IOW: heisenbugs.)

Also, I've got some unease when I think about what mal-ware authors could come up with using this technology. Sure, we'll come up with something else to counteract that... but I think it'll bring up another order of magnitude's worth of challenge in this cat and mouse game we already have.

Re:hardware/software communicating? inconceivable!

[kebes]

The linked article doesn't really explain the work very well. The project homepage has quite a bit more information. What they are trying to accomplish is indeed a middle-layer between applications and hardware (e.g. OS functions or drivers) but the point is the solve a particular optimization problem (speed, low power usage, security) by optimizing software and hardware together.

So, for example, if low power usage is the goal, then instead of fine-tuning the hardware for low power usage, and then also tuning the software for low power usage (e.g. getting rid of unnecessary loops, checks, etc.), the strategy would be to create specific hooks in the hardware system (accessible via the OS and/or a driver, of course) to allow this fine-tuning. Nowadays we have chips that can regulate themselves so that they don't use excessive power. But it could be even more efficient if the software were able to signal the hardware, for instance differentiating between "I'm just waking up to do a quick, boring check--no need to scale the CPU up to full power" versus "I'm about to start a complex task and would like the CPU ramped up to full power."

They claim to have some encouraging results. From one of the abstracts:

We have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on the well-known dI/dt problem, where we successfully stabilized the voltage fluctuations of the CPU's power supply by transforming the source code of the executing application using feedback from hardware.

Obviously the idea of having software and hardware interact is not new (that's what computers do, after all)... but the intent of this project is, apparently, to push much more aggressively into a realm where optimizations are realized by using explicit signaling between hardware and software systems. (Rather than leaving the hardware or OS to guess what hardware state is best suited to the task at hand.)