The university of Edinburgh and the university of Karlsruhe apply for an extension of this cluster.

Goal of the cluster is to deploy the Karlsruhe's cache monitor as
the basis for Edinburgh to develop a reconfigurable cache
architecture. During this initial collaboration, the university of
Edinburgh defined the monitoring requirements and interface for the
cache architecture, while the university of Karlsruhe extended its
monitoring specification according to this demand. A monitor simulator
has been integrated into the Edinburgh's simulation environment which
is used to initially study the potentiality and advantage of cache
reconfiguration. This integration enables a first evaluation of the
monitoring concept and the generation of performance data about the
runtime data accesses and cache activities. Partial results have been
published in conference proceedings of HPCC06 and
EuroPar06. Publications for more results are currently in preparation.

Based on the initial experience and benefits, we plan to continue this
collaboration for a further year in order to achieve the final goal of
this cluster: applying the monitor for reconfigurable cache
architecture. Currently, the university of Karlsruhe is implementing
the cache monitor in hardware and will develop fast algorithms to
extract access patterns, such as program phase, from the monitoring
data. The university of Edinburgh is currently modeling the
reconfigurable cache architecture and will go further to the hardware
design of this architecture. Hence, the contribution of Karlsruhe to
the further step of this collaboration is to evaluate the monitoring
data, to analyze the access pattern of applications, and then to
determine cache configurations for each program phase. Edinburgh's
contribution will then be the modification of the cache organization
according to this decision and the development of methodologies for
optimally managing the cached data towards reuse, consistency, and
other issues arising with cache reconfiguration.

The goal of this further collaboration is to enable more exchange of
the experience held by both research groups. More importantly, we
intend to achieve a prototypical implementation of the complete
monitor and reconfigurable cache system.

The collaboration between Edinburgh and Karlsruhe will be established
through a number of mutual visits of about one or two week
duration. During these visits implementation details have to be
discussed, interfaces of both monitor and cache hardware combined,
format and querying interface of the monitoring information specified,
applications for evaluation designed, and system evaluated. We request
resources for 5 visits: one visit of one week by one of the project
leaders, two visits of two weeks by one Karlsruhe member to Edinburgh
and one Edinburgh member to Karlsruhe, and two visits of one week by
one member of both research groups. We also apply resources for
attending the cluster meetings for members of both groups. The
estimated cost of the one week visit is 1200 euros, the two week visit
1800 euros, and the cluster meetings 5000 euros, for a total of 12200
euros requested.

Aris Efthymiou - Assistant Professor, University of Edinburgh
Pedro Diaz - Ph.D. candidate, University of Edinburgh
Jie Tao - Research associate, University of Karlsruhe
Rainer Buchty - Research associate, University of Karlsruhe