[Nets-seminars] UCL CS Distinguished Lecture: Prof Babak Falsafi (EPFL), Tue 4 Feb, 2 PM, MPEB 6.12

[Brad Karp]

Greetings, everyone.

It's my pleasure to announce a talk by Prof Babak Falsafi of EPFL (formerly of CMU), renowned computer architect. Babak will speak in MPEB 6.12 at 2 PM on Tuesday, the 4th of February.

Let me emphasize that no matter the area of CS you work in, this is a talk you should find relevant and interesting.

Computer architecture is hugely important to the work of practically every computer scientist, as it dictates what the CPUs we all use look like (and thus what algorithms need to look like). For decades, computer architects devised ingenious techniques for increasing CPU clock speeds and extracting ever greater performance from the same sequential programs. They then determined that clock speed increases could not be sustained any longer because of fundamental limits on heat dissipation. Thus began the era of multi-core CPUs, which offer increased parallelism, but not clock-rate increases. That shift has required rethinking algorithms and data structures, compilers, OS kernels, memory consistency models, and even debugging and testing, among other areas.

Babak will speak on the next round of scaling limitations that future server-class CPUs will encounter, and how those limitations will change the way CPUs look, including his own creative work on how to ensure that future CPUs continue to offer performance increases despite these limitations.

He will target his talk to a general CS audience--he will not be assuming specialist knowledge of computer architecture.

All very strongly encouraged to attend. Again, this a topic that undergirds what all of us do!

Title, abstact, and bio follow.

-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

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UCL CS Distinguished Lecture

Speaker:

	Babak Falsafi
	Professor of Computer and Communication Sciences
	Director, EcoCloud Research Center
	EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences

Title:

	Big Data and Dark Silicon: Taming Two IT Inflection Points on a Collision Course

Time and place:

	4th February 2014, 2 PM, MPEB 6.12

Abstract:

Information technology is now an indispensable pillar of a modern-day society, thanks to the proliferation of digital platforms in the past several decades. We are now witnessing two inflection points, however, that are about to change IT as we know it. First, we are entering the Big Data era where demand for robust and economical data processing, communication and storage is growing faster than technology can sustain. Second, while forecasts indicate that chip density scaling will continue for another decade, the diminishing returns in supply voltage scaling and the impending "energy wall" are leading server designers towards energy-centric solutions, and ultimately Dark Silicon. In this talk, I will motivate these two IT trends and present promising research avenues for server chip design including specialized scale-out processors, on-chip networks and die-stacked DRAM cache hierarchies.

Bio:

Babak is Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the founding director of the EcoCloud research center pioneering future energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly cloud technologies at EPFL. He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a scalable multiprocessor architecture which was prototyped by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), snoop filters and temporal stream prefetchers that are incorporated into IBM BlueGene/P and BlueGene/Q, and computer system simulation sampling methodologies that have been in use by AMD and HP for research and product development. His most notable contribution has been to be first to show that contrary to conventional wisdom, multiprocessor memory programming models -- known as memory consistency models -- prevalent in all modern systems are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve high performance. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a fellow of IEEE.
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