Configurable Spatial Accelerator (CSA) is an EDGE instruction set architecture designed by Intel.

Motivation

The push to exascale computing demands a very high floating-point performance while maintaining a very aggressive power budget. Intel claims that the CSA architecture is capable of replacing the traditional out-of-order superscalar while surpassing it in performance and power. CSA supports the same HPC programming models supported by traditional microprocessors.

Overview

CSA claims to offer an order-of-magnitude gain in energy efficiency and performance relative to existing HPC microprocessors through the use of highly-dense and efficient atomic compute units. The basic structure of the configurable spatial accelerator (CSA) is a dense heterogeneous array of processing elements (PEs) tiles along with an on-die interconnect network and a memory interface. The array of processing elements can include integer arithmetic PEs, floating-point arithmetic PEs, communication circuitry, and in - fabric storage. This group of tiles may be stand-alone or may be part of an even larger tile. The accelerator executes data flow graphs directly instead traditional sequential instruction streams.

Each of the processing elements supports a few highly efficient operations, thus they can only handle a few of the dataflow graph operations. Different PEs support different operations of the dataflow graph. PEs execute simultaneously irrespective of the operations of the other PEs. PEs can execute a dataflow operation whenever it has input data available and there is sufficient space available for storing the output data.

Bibliography

• Kermin E.F. et al. (July 5, 2018). US Patent No. US20180189231A1.