The Rogues Gallery is a new concept focused on developing our understanding of next-generation hardware with a focus on unorthodox and uncommon technologies. This project, initiated by Georgia Tech's Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH), will acquire new and unique hardware (ie, the aforementioned "rogues") from vendors, research labs, and startups and make this hardware available to students, faculty, and industry collaborators within a managed data center environment. By exposing students and researchers to this set of unique hardware, we hope to foster cross-cutting discussions about hardware designs that will drive future performance improvements in computing long after the Moore's Law era of "cheap transistors" ends.

1. CRNCH Rogues Gallery: A Community Core
for Novel Computing Platforms
E. Jason Riedy, Jeffrey Young
School of Computational Science and Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
3 November 2017

2. Outline
Why Do We Need Rogues?
Current Rogues
Emu Chick
3D Stacked Memories and FPGAs
Neuromorphic Hardware
Infrastructure and Invitation
(Some) Enabled Research
Streaming Graph Analysis
Sparse Tensors
Sparse Matrix Operations

3. Why do we need rogues?
Rogue
Someone who goes their own way, who breaks away
from the crowd.
• Current architectures are hitting limits on
manufacturing, heat dissipation, memory latency...
• What happens when novel prototypes hit reality?
• Designers need feedback, a software ecosystem, and
trained students.
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 3/16

4. Apps: Massive+-scale data analysis
Cyber-security Identify anomalies, malicious actors
Health care Find outbreaks, population epidemiology, similar
patient association
Social networks Advertising, searching, grouping
Intelligence Decisions at scale, regulating markets, smart &
sustainable cities
Systems biology Understanding interactions, drug design
Power grid / Smart cities Disruptions, conservation, prediction
Irregular data access. Changing data.
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 4/16

5. Introducing the CRNCH Rogues Gallery
CRNCH Rogues Gallery
A physical & virtual space for hosting novel computing
architectures, systems, and accelerators.
Host / manage remote access for novel architectures to
• kick-start software ecosystems (Kokkos),
• leverage real applications to train students, and
• provide rapid feedback to architects.
Amortize effort and cost of trying novel architectures.
Break the “but it’s too much work” barrier.
http://crnch.gatech.edu/rogues-gallery
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 5/16

6. Why here and now?
• Past (and present): Experience with hosting,
software, training for novel architectures:
• STI Center for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor;
• NVIDIA Center for Excellence;
• multiple Intel Parallel Computing Centers; and
• multiple NSF & DARPA projects.
• Developed expertise, now sharing efforts.
• Current local- to national-scale applications:
• Machine learning: ML@GT
• Health care analytics, clinical focus: CHAI
• Data-driven science & discovery: NSF South Big Data Hub,
FLAMEL, IDEaS, ATL Data Science for Social Good
• Combining novel architectures & applications.
• And enabling new combinations for others!
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 6/16

7. Current Rogues
Current Rogues
Emu Chick
3D Stacked Memories and FPGAs
Neuromorphic Hardware
Infrastructure and Invitation
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 7/16

8. Emu Chick
• “Migratory Memory Side Processing” to
exploit weak locality.
• Data for graph edge attributes,
documents / medical records, etc. reside
nearby even if accessed irregularly.
• Moving threads to data on reads means
all accesses are local, common case
needs to tolerate less latency.
Gossamer CPU
Memory
Gossamer CPU
Memory
Migrate on read
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 8/16

9. 3D Stacked Memory and FPGAs
• Rogues Gallery includes traditional FPGA platforms
(Arria 10, Ultrascale+) and stacked memory variants
• Enable “near-memory” and memory-centric
processing.
• FPGA platforms enable prototypes of non-traditional
accelerators like Automata, sparse data engines, etc.
• Current work is supported in part by Micron
hardware donation.
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 9/16

10. Neuromorphic systems
• Field-Programmable Analog Array (FPAA) System-On
Chip, designed in the lab of Dr. Jennifer Hasler.
• Uses analog technology supported by digital
components to achieve unprecedented power and
size reductions.
• Near-term industry products include TrueNorth and
Intel Loihi
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 10/16

11. Flexible Infrastructure
Front end, rg-login
Emu SDK
FPGA dev
Emu Chick
FPGA+HMC
...
Your HW?
• Always WIP. Will adapt to individual needs.
• Front-end node for general access.
• Slurm for overall queuing and access control.
• Controls access-limited development tools.
• NDAs: Groups, file permissions
• Limited licenses: VMs and slurm resources
• Working towards sensitive data, e.g. health care.
• Swap VLANs for resources? (SDN)
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 11/16

12. (Some) Enabled Research
(Some) Enabled Research
Streaming Graph Analysis
Sparse Tensors
Sparse Matrix Operations
Only a sampling, more projects are ongoing & interested!
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 12/16

13. Streaming graph analysis
Streaming graph frameworks:
• STINGER: 3M upd/s in 1.1B vertex,
17B edge graph on 4×Haswell
• Hornet: 120M upd/s in 50M vertex
graph on P100
DynoGraph: wrap above for evaluation
on other architectures!
• Emu Chick simulator
• Emu Chick hardware!
Adding dynamic community detection,
incremental PageRank, concurrent
analysis, and more.
Support: IARPA, NSF, DARPA, Intel, IBM, NVIDIA, Oracle, ORNLCRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 13/16

14. Sparse tensors
• ParTI: Supports fast, essential sparse tensor
operations on CPU and GPU.
• Rogues Gallery supports extensions to Emu and
FPGA+3D memories
• Incorporates open data sets like FROSTT
Support: NSF, DoE
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 14/16

15. Sparse matrix operations
• Sparse primitives provide a key point for optimizing
data movement
• We are looking to optimize sparse primitives with 3D
memories for HPC libraries like SuperLU
• Scatter and gather are key but other primitives are
also useful in graph analytics
Support: NSF
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 15/16

16. Others are joining!
Other local researchers are looking to use the Rogues:
• Multilingual topic modeling with NMF
• Fraud detection in health insurance
• Anomalies for computer network security
We welcome external users and their applications!
CRNCH Rogues Gallery connects researchers with novel
architectures and architects with upcoming applications.
Let us host / manage your neat stuff!
http://crnch.gatech.edu/rogues-gallery
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017 16/16

17. External Image Credits
• Oscar Wilde: public domain, obtained from Wikipedia
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: public domain, obtained from
Wikipedia
• Dread Pirate Roberts: copyright 20th
Century Fox, used for
identification
• Mary Jackson, Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan
(Hidden Figures): copyright 20th
Century Fox, used for
identification
• Malcolm Reynolds: copyright Universal Pictures, used for
identification
• Rogue One: copyright Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures,
used for identification
• The Story of Karrawingi, the emu (cover): copyright estate of
Leslie Rees, used for identification
CRNCH Rogues Gallery — 3 Nov 2017