Merrimac -- High-Performance and Highly-Efficient Scientific Computing with Streams

Stanford Ph.D. Dissertation: Advances in VLSI technology have made the raw ingredients for computation plentiful. Large numbers of fast functional units and large amounts of memory and bandwidth can be made efficient in terms of chip area, cost, and energy, however, high-performance computers realize only a small fraction of VLSI's potential. This dissertation describes the Merrimac streaming supercomputer architecture and system. Merrimac has an integrated view of the applications, software system, compiler, and architecture. We will show how this approach leads to over an order of magnitude gains in performance per unit cost, unit power, and unit floor-space for scientific applications when compared to common scientific computers designed around clusters of commodity general-purpose processors. The dissertation discusses Merrimac's stream architecture, the mapping of scientific codes to effectively run on the stream architecture, and system issues in the Merrimac supercomputer.