Special issue on energy efficient multi-core and many-core systems, Part II

Multi-core and many-core architectures have become conventional to meet performance requirements of emerging applications ranging from massively parallel data centers to ultra-low power embedded devices for the Internet-of-things. It is expected that the number of cores in these systems increases dramatically in the near future. For such systems, energy efficiency is one of the primary design constraints. The cessation of Dennard scaling and the dark silicon phenomenon have limited recent improvements in transistor speed and energy efficiency, resulting in slowed improvements in multi-core and many-core systems. Consequently, architectural innovations have become crucial to achieve performance and efficiency gains. In addition, multi-core and many-core systems need to be able to reconfigure themselves adaptively by monitoring their own condition and the surrounding environment in order to adapt to different scenarios and performance-power requirements. Runtime resource management becomes crucial in modern parallel and distributed multicore systems due to increase in thermal issues as well as due to the need for various adaptive management techniques to maximize energy efficiency.

In this special issue, the Guest Editors have put together some of the new developments and trends in the context of energy efficient multi-core and many-core systems. We received fifty-three submissions and a total of six were accepted for this part. The high level of competition has led to the selection of top-level contributions covering a wide spectrum of topics in the domain of energy-efficient systems including on-chip communication, cache design, heterogeneity-supported model of computation, thermal management, and GPU-based acceleration.