Principal Investigator Jack Dennis
The Fresh Breeze Project
The Fresh Breeze project is what Professor Dennis calls his effort to apply what I have learned and observed in computer architecture to the design of a multiprocessor chip.
In September 2005 an National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant was awarded to support the development of a cycle-accurate simulator to model and evaluate the Fresh Breeze multi-core architecture. During the summer of 2006, students built a GUI as a tool for running and testing the simulator and a translator for generating machine code for the simulator from Java bytecode files was completed. We are currently using these tools to check out operation of the simulator. Several simple programs have been run successfully and the project is working toward running meaningful program examples including multithread programs in the summer of 2007. The multithread programming model for the Fresh Breeze architecture has evolved significantly and is described in a recent paper, The Fresh Breeze Model of Thread Execution.