# ICS2022
27 June 2022
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# Luke Leighton bio
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton specialises in Libre Ethical Technology.
He has been using, programming and reverse-engineering computing
devices continuously for 44 years, has a BEng (Hons), ACGI, in
Theory of Computing from Imperial College, and recently put that
education to good use in the form of the Libre-SOC
Project: an entirely Libre-Licensed 3D Hybrid CPU-VPU-GPU based on
OpenPOWER. He writes poetry and has been developing a HEP Physics theory
for the past 36 years in his spare time.
# Coherent Distributed Computing: ZOLC, SVP64, OpenCAPI
Deterministic Scheduled Zero-Overhead Loops have a startling property:
their deterministic nature allows them to be distributed. Extra-V began
to illustrate the potential here, by performing near-Memory Coherent
and conditional Graph walking, making full use of OpenCAPI's potential.
Snitch also led the way, bringing back Auto-increment Load/Store from
the CISC era, but hidden behind Tagged Registers connected to
Coherent FIFOs leading indirectly to main Memory. Where both Snitch
and Extra-V used limited variants of Deterministic Loops as
proof-of-concept to support their overall research, with only rudimentary
processing capability,
ZOLC is a much more deeply extensive and well-defined Deterministic Loop
Control system that can fit directly on top of a standard ISA.
SVP64 takes the Zero-Overhead Loop concept firmly into Supercomputing
Vector Processing territory, currently limited to the register file.
This talk explores the potential of combining Snitch and Extra-V's
pioneering techniques, combining SVP64 and ZOLC, and leveraging OpenCAPI,
on top of the OpenPOWER ISA, to create High-performance Coherent
Distributed Computing with the potential to run large-scale Parallel
Compute tasks at 100% sustained throughput whilst also bringing the potential
of Snitch's 85% power-consumption-reduction to bear, using assembly intrinsics at
in a normal everyday ubiquitous Software environment: no specialist
parallel programming languages or special compilers needed.