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Technology constraints and application characteristics are radically changing as we scale to the end of silicon technology and transition to post-CMOS devices. Devices are becoming increasingly brittle, highly varying in their properties, and error-prone, leading to a fundamentally unpredictable hardware substrate. The model of hardware being correct all the time, on all regions of chip, and forever, becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain. Emerging new classes of applications are increasingly relying on probabilistic methods. They have an inherent tolerance for uncertainty, do not require hardware to be correct all the time, and this provides an opportunity to creatively utilize hardware.
We are investigating Reliability Aware Systems (REAL) in which, we expose device properties through layers of the system stack up to the application. This is a radical departure from conventional systems that attempt to hide and mask unpredictable behavior to create an illusion of perfection. We are building system software, architecture, and microarchitectural mechanisms that can scale to future technologies.
Providing significant improvement to visual quality for 3D graphics requires a fundamentally new system-level rethink from algorithms down to the architecture. The conventional Z-buffer algorithm and the architecture model of GPUs does not provide sufficient support for complex illumination effects like soft-shadows, reflections, and defocus blurring for example. In this project, we target the entire graphics system stack and are developing algorithms and software architecture, hardware architecture, and analysis tools to build next-generation 3D graphics systems for real-time ray tracing. The end goal of this project is to build this protoype chip and run real games and real workload at real-time rates.