Building a Personal High Performance Computer with Heterogeneous Processors

Personal high performance computer (PHPC) requires lower cost and high performance. The Teraflops PHPC systems with special accelerator units like GPGPU have been presented, but they have difficulties in programming, compatibility and applicability. In this paper, we present HPP-PHPC, a hybrid architecture of heterogeneous processors connected by non-coherent off-chip system bus. The performance of HPP-PHPC is ensured by special processors integrated with vector units and high-efficiency interconnection between heterogeneous processors. And by the adoption of general processors and features like global physical address space and synchronization semantics in hardware, HPP-PHPC is more compatible and convenient for massage passing and PGAS programming model. Also it is more applicable to most applications, including those with many execution branches. Initial results obtained from our prototype system have proved our design.