Advancing Computer Systems without Technology Progress - Christos Kozyrakis, Stanford University

Δευτέρα 17 Σεπτεμβρίου 2012, στις 12.00.

Τμήμα Πληροφορικής & Τηλεπικοινωνιών, Εθνικό & Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών

Αίθουσα Α2

Advancing Computer Systems without Technology Progress

Christos Kozyrakis, Stanford University

Talk Abstract – Computing is now an essential tool for all aspects of human endeavor, including healthcare, education, science, commerce, government, and entertainment. We expect our computers, whether those hidden away in data-centers or those in a handheld form factor, to be capable of running sophisticated algorithms that process rapidly growing volumes of data. In other words, we expect our computers to have exponentially increasing performance at constant cost (energy and chip area). For decades, CMOS technology has been our ally, providing exponential improvements in both transistor density and energy consumption, which we turned into exponential improvements in system performance. Unfortunately, we are now in a phase where transistor cost and energy consumption are barely scaling, making it necessary to rethink the way we build scalable systems.

In this talk, we will consider how to advance computer systems without technology progress. There are several promising directions that combined can provide improvements equivalent to several decades of Moore's law. These directions include massive parallelism with locality awareness, specialization, removing the bloat from our infrastructure, increasing system utilization, and embracing approximate computing. We will review motivating results in these areas, establish that they require cross-layer optimizations across both hardware and software, and discuss the remaining challenges that systems researchers must address.

Speaker Bio – Christos Kozyrakis is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Stanford University. He works on architectures, runtime environments, and programming models for parallel computing systems. At Berkeley, he developed the IRAM architecture, a novel media-processor system that combined vector processing with embedded DRAM technology. At Stanford, he co-led the Transactional Coherence and Consistency (TCC) project that developed hardware and software mechanisms for programming with transactional memory. He also led the Raksha project that developed practical hardware support and security policies to deter high-level and low-level security attacks against deployed software. Dr. Kozyrakis is currently working on hardware and software techniques for next-generation data centers. He is also a member of the Pervasive Parallelism Lab at Stanford, a multi-faculty effort to make parallel computing practical for the masses.

Christos received a BS degree from the University of Crete (Greece) and a PhD degree from the University of California at Berkeley (USA), both in Computer Science. He is the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell faculty scholar at Stanford and a senior member of the ACM and the IEEE. Christos has received the NSF Career Award, an IBM Faculty Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant, and a Noyce Family Faculty Scholarship.