X86 | EPFL Graph Search

x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486 processors. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486". The term is not synonymous with IBM PC compatibility, as this implies a multitude of other computer hardware. Embedded systems and general-purpose computers used x86 chips before the PC-compatible market started, some of them before the IBM PC (1981) debut. , most desktop and laptop computers sold are based on the x86 architecture fa

Synthesis of Flexible Accelerators for Early Adoption of Ring-LWE Post-quantum Cryptography

Subhadeep Banik, Hamid Nejatollahi, Francesco Regazzoni

The advent of the quantum computer makes current public-key infrastructure insecure. Cryptography community is addressing this problem by designing, efficiently implementing, and evaluating novel public-key algorithms capable of withstanding quantum computational power. Governmental agencies, such as NIST, are promoting standardization of quantum-resistant algorithms that is expected to run for 7 years. Several modern applications must maintain permanent data secrecy; therefore, they ultimately require the use of quantum-resistant algorithms. Because algorithms are still under scrutiny for eventual standardization, the deployment of the hardware implementation of quantum-resistant algorithms is still in early stages. In this article, we propose a methodology to design programmable hardware accelerators for lattice-based algorithms, and we use the proposed methodology to implement flexible and energy efficient post-quantum cache-based accelerators for NewHope, Kyber, Dilithium, Key Consensus from Lattice (KCL), and R.EMBLEM submissions to the NIST standardization contest. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first efficient domain-specific, programmable cache-based accelerators for lattice-based algorithms. We design a single accelerator for a common kernel among various schemes with different kernel sizes, i.e., loop count, and data types. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of designing one special purpose accelerators for each scheme. We validate our methodology by integrating our accelerators into an HLS-based SoC infrastructure based on the X86 processor and evaluate overall performance. Our experiments demonstrate the suitability of the approach and allow us to collect insightful information about the performance bottlenecks and the energy efficiency of the explored algorithms. Our results provide guidelines for hardware designers, highlighting the optimization points to address for achieving the highest energy minimization and performance increase. At the same time, our proposed design allows us to specify and execute new variants of lattice-based schemes with superior energy efficiency compared to the main application processor without changing the hardware acceleration platform. For example, we manage to reduce the energy consumption up to 2.1x and energy-delay product (EDP) up to 5.2x and improve the speedup up to 2.5x.

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

SIMinG-1k: A thousand-core simulator running on general-purpose graphical processing units

David Atienza Alonso, Luca Benini, Shivani Raghav, Martino Ruggiero

This paper introduces SIMinG-1k-a manycore simulator infrastructure. SIMinG-1k is a graphics processing unit accelerated, parallel simulator for design-space exploration of large-scale manycore systems. It features an optimal trade-off between modeling accuracy and simulation speed. Its main objectives are high performance, flexibility, and ability to simulate thousands of cores. SIMinG-1k can model different architectures (currently, we support ARM (Available from: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.ddi0100i/index.html) and Intel x86) using two-step approac where architecture specific front end is decoupled from a fast and parallel manycore virtual machine running on graphical processing unit platform. We evaluate the simulator for target architecture with up to 4096 cores. Our results demonstrate very high scalability and almost linear speedup with simulation of increasing number of cores.

Wiley-Blackwell2013

Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization

Edouard Bugnion

This book focuses on the core question of the necessary architectural support provided by hardware to efficiently run virtual machines, and of the corresponding design of the hypervisors that run them. Virtualization is still possible when the instruction set architecture lacks such support, but the hypervisor remains more complex and must rely on additional techniques. Despite the focus on architectural support in current architectures, some historical perspec- tive is necessary to appropriately frame the problem. e first half of the book provides the historical perspective of the theoretical framework developed four decades ago by Popek and Goldberg. It also describes earlier systems that enabled virtualization despite the lack of architectural support in hardware. As is often the case, theory defines a necessary—but not sufficient—set of features, and modern architectures are the result of the combination of the theoretical framework with insights derived from practical systems. e second half of the book describes state-of-the-art support for virtualization in both x86-64 and ARM processors. is book includes an in-depth description of the CPU, memory, and I/O virtualization of these two processor architectures, as well as case studies on the Linux/KVM, VMware, and Xen hypervisors. It concludes with a performance comparison of virtualization on current-generation x86- and ARM-based systems across multiple hypervisors.

Mogan & Claypool2017

Synthesis of Flexible Accelerators for Early Adoption of Ring-LWE Post-quantum Cryptography

Subhadeep Banik, Hamid Nejatollahi, Francesco Regazzoni

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020