WaveScalar Computational Substrate
The next two decades will bring us computation resources that seem unimaginable today. Advancements in lithographic technology will make devices of ten billion transistors and beyond. With this opportunity, however, come significant archi tectural challenges that will require a revolution as fundamental as the migration to VLSI. Relative to computation, communication will be orders of magnitude slower. An enormous number of transistors will be available, but there reliability will progressively decrease. Finally, one device that is not changing very quickly is the human mind. This is leading to the ever-expanding productivity-gap between the complexity of modern architectures and the rate at which they can be designed and verified. We propose the Computation Cache, a unique way to construct systems that forges together the concepts of an instruction cache and a microprocessor into a single unified idea.

Architectures for Quantum Computers
Quantum computers seem the subject of science fiction, but their tremendous computational potential is closer than we may think. Despite significant practical difficulties, small quantum devices of 5 to 7 bits have been built in the laboratory. Silicon technologies promise even greater scalability. To use these technologies effectively, and help guide quantum device research, computer architects need to start designing and reasoning about quantum processors now. However, two major hurdles stand in the way. First, compactly describable rules that characterize silicon-based quantum computing technologies are not known. Second, there does not exist an infrastructure to design, test, and evaluate architectural alternatives.

Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors
Architecture research in the last 30 years has been a simulation-driven field. Simulation is flexible, and easy, but also easily divorced from reality. It is also slow, and as the systems we design become ever more complex, the speed of simulation forces us to explore less and less of processor execution time. Fortunately, FPGAs have come a long way, and it now seems plausible to utilize them for basic architeture research. RAMP aims to build a community wide infrastructure for carrying out architecture and software research on FPGAs.