EDN's 18th Annual Innovation Awards Finalists

With the move to digital representations of all media types and complex applications, such as video processing, increasingly dealing with parallel data flows in real time is the stiffest system-design challenge. William “Bill” Dally has been working on the concept of data-parallel processing since the early 1990s. At last year’s ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference), Dally and his team from Steam Processors Inc unveiled the Storm-1 family of data-parallel DSPs and, later in the year, the team unveiled the Storm-1 SP16HP. Stream believes that a single Storm-1 processor can replace as many as 10 traditional DSPs.

Dally co-founded the company in 2004. While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early and mid-’90s and later at Stanford University, Dally recognized that instruction-centric approaches to processor design were rapidly running out of instruction-level parallelism. Processor designers were rapidly facing increasingly complex power and bandwidth barriers that would ultimately limit the ability to increase performance to the levels that emerging applications required.

The Storm-1 SP16HP offers 224 GMACs (billion multiply/accumulate) operations at 0.1 mW per MMAC (million MAC) operations. Equally important, Dally and his team tackled the difficulty of programming such a parallel device and offer a compiler to manage the memory hierarchy. The memory-management capability reduces bandwidth needs across the parallel architecture and supports the control flows for synchronizing tasks. The architecture delivers load balancing and eliminates a common problem in multicore systems: partitioning an application. In addition to the Storm-1 processor, Dally’s work on his original stream-processing architecture is now in development or production at AMD, IBM, and Nvidia.