CRI: II-NEW: MYSTIC: Programmable Systems Research Testbed to Explore a Stack-WIde Adaptive System fabriC

NSF Award CNS-1730689; $1,000,000; July 2017 through June 2020. This project is a collaborative effort with Ioan Raicu and Xian-He Sun at IIT.

This project will build a testbed for experimenting with reconfigurable communication and Input/Output subsystems to conduct low-level systems research. This goal of this research is to remove network, memory and storage performance bottlenecks by dynamically reconfiguring them to the needs of an application. As the nature of computing applications change from compute-centric to data-centric, communication of data comprises a large part of program execution. In this testbed, the organization of memory, storage and their connectivity will change dynamically to adapt to the workload to improve overall performance of the executing programs.

The PIs will build a dynamically configurable cluster called MYSTIC to study system re-configurability across the entire computing stack, from the processor to memory, storage, and the network. It will allow low-level experimentation and reconfiguration at the level of networks-on-chip (NoC), universal memory, and the network interconnect with multidimensional network topologies. Dynamically reconfiguring interconnects, memory and storage will speed-up applications running on a heterogeneous computing environment. Examples of target applications include dynamic multipath routing for load-balancing, universal memory that deploys byte addressable Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMM) for persistent storage and Network-on-Chip (NoC) abstractions for Operating Systems.