Silicon Heterogeneity in the Cloud by Prof. Babak Falsafi

Department of Computer Science and Automation
CSA Distinguished Lecture

Speaker : Prof. Babak Falsafi

Title : Silicon Heterogeneity in the Cloud

Date : Tuesday, July 09, 2019

Time : 4:00 PM

Venue : Faculty Hall, Indian Institute of Science

Abstract

Cloud providers are building infrastructure at unprecedented speeds. We have witnessed the emergence of data-centric information technology in almost every aspect of our life from commerce, healthcare, entertainment, governance to scientific discovery. The demand for processing, communicating and storing data has grown faster than conventional growth in digital platforms. Meanwhile, the conventional silicon technologies we have relied on for the past several decades leading to the exponential growth in IT have slowed down (the conventional 40%/year increase in density has dropped to 17%/year in recent years). In light of this increase in demand on data-centric IT and the diminishing returns in platform scalability, our future increasingly relies on emerging technologies that introduce heterogeneity in both logic and memory.

In this talk, I will motivate the grand challenges in scaling digital platforms and data-centric technologies, then present opportunities for pushing the envelope on server architecture in the post-Moore era.

Biography of the speaker

Babak Falsafi is Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the founding director of the EcoCloud research center at EPFL. He has worked on server architecture for quite some time and has had contributions to a few industrial platforms including the WildFire/WildCat family of multiprocessors by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), memory system technologies for IBM BlueGene/P and Q and ARM cores, and server evaluation methodologies in use by AMD, HP and Google (PerfKit). His recent work on scale-out server processor design lays the foundation for Cavium ThunderX. He is a fellow of ACM and IEEE.

Host Faculty : Arkaprava Basu