EM2, Ascend, and Angstrom: Processor Building at MIT

We describe three processors in various stages of design
and implementation at MIT. The Execution Migration Machine (EM2) is a computation-migration-based multicore architecture that provides
speedy access to on-chip distributed cache data by either migrating
execution or via remote memory operations. A 110-core chip was taped
out in January in 45nm technology.

Ascend "” Architecture for Secure Computation on Encrypted Data "”
is a new processor architecture that guarantees security of encrypted
data even under malicious application software. Ascend uses obfuscated
instruction execution and oblivious RAM to hide what instruction is being
executed at any given time, so the program cannot leak information about
encrypted data. We have performed detailed simulations of an Ascend
processor design to evaluate overheads of encrypted computation.

Angstrom is a proposed design of a 1000-core processor that includes selfawareness
in the processor, memory and network subsystems to address
the energy wall problem in multicores. We have recently fabricated a "tile"
of Angstrom that includes self-aware processor features.
Srini Devadas is the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1988. He served as
the Associate Head of EECS with responsibility for Computer Science from
2005-2011. Devadas has worked in the areas of Computer-Aided Design,
testing, formal verification, compilers for embedded processors, computer
architecture, computer security, and computational biology and has coauthored
numerous papers in these areas and received 13 best paper
awards. Devadas was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999.