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Processor architectures have crossed a critical threshold.
Manufactures have given up attempting to extract ever more performance
from a single core and instead have turned to multi-core designs.
However, little is known on how to build, program, or manage systems of
64 to 1024 processors, and the computer architecture community
lacks the basic infrastructure tools required to carry out this research.
Fortunately, Moore's law has not only enabled these dense
multi-core chips, it has also enabled extremely dense FPGAs. Today, one
to two dozen cores can be programmed into a single FPGA. With
multiple FPGAs on a board and multiple boards in a system, large complex
architectures can be explored. Such a system will not just invigorate
multiprocessors research in the architecture community, but since
processors cores can run at 100 to 200 MHz, a large scale
multiprocessor would be fast enough to run operating systems and large
programs at speeds sufficient to support software research. Hence, we
believe such a system will accelerate research across all the fields that
touch multiple processors: operating systems, compilers,
debuggers, programming languages, scientific libraries, and so on. Thus
the acronym
RAMP, for Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors.
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