The White Dwarf: A High-Performance Application-Specific Processor

Andrew Wolfe, Maurício Breternitz Jr., Chriss Stephens, A. L. Ting, David Blair Kirk, Ronald P. Bianchini Jr., John Paul Shen

Abstract: The design and implementation of a high-performance special-purpose processor, called the White Dwarf, or accelerating finite-element analysis algorithms is presented. The White Dwarf CPU contains two Am2935 32-bit floating-point processors and one Am29332 32-bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU), and uses a wide-instruction-word architecture in which the application algorithm is directly implemented in microcode. The entire system is VME-bus compatible and interfaces with a Sun 3/160 host. The system's potential peak performance is 20 MFLOPS (million floating-point operations per second) a sustained computation rate in excess of 15 MFLOPS is expected. A potential speedup of between one and two orders of magnitude is possible. With a fully populated memory subsystem, the White Dwarf can accommodate finite-element problems involving up to half a million nodes. The system is designed using an approach called application-specific processor design (ASPD). A retargetable compiler has been developed which is capable of generating highly parallel and efficient code for the White Dwarf and other processors with similar architecture. System debug/integration is in progress; a highly useful system is expected.<