The rise of high-throughput computing

Abstract

In recent years, the advent of emerging computing applications, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, has led to three common requirements in computer system design: high utilization, high throughput, and low latency. Herein, these are referred to as the requirements of ‘high-throughput computing (HTC)’. We further propose a new indicator called ‘sysentropy’ for measuring the degree of chaos and uncertainty within a computer system. We argue that unlike the designs of traditional computing systems that pursue high performance and low power consumption, HTC should aim at achieving low sysentropy. However, from the perspective of computer architecture, HTC faces two major challenges that relate to (1) the full exploitation of the application’s data parallelism and execution concurrency to achieve high throughput, and (2) the achievement of low latency, even in the cases at which severe contention occurs in data paths with high utilization. To overcome these two challenges, we introduce two techniques: on-chip data flow architecture and labeled von Neumann architecture. We build two prototypes that can achieve high throughput and low latency, thereby significantly reducing sysentropy.