The 48th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2015

Preparing for a Post Moore's Law World

Speaker: 

    Prof. Todd Austin
    University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

Abstract: 

For decades, Moore's Law scaling has been the fuel that propelled the computing industry forward, by delivering performance, power and cost advantages with each new generation of silicon. Today, these scaling benefits are slowing to a crawl. If the computing industry wants to continue to make scalability the primary source of value in tomorrow's computing systems, we will have to quickly find new and productive ways to scale future systems.

In this talk, I will highlight my work and the work of others that is rejuvenating scaling through the application of heterogeneous parallel designs. Leveraging these technologies to solve the scaling problem will be a significant challenge, as future scalability success will ultimately be less about "how" to do it and more about "how much" will it cost.

Biography – Todd Austin 

Todd Austin is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research interests include computer architecture, robust and secure system design, hardware and software verification, and performance analysis tools and techniques. Currently Todd is director of C-FAR, the Center for Future Architectures Research, a multi-university SRC/DARPA funded center that is seeking technologies to scale the performance and efficiency of future computing systems. Prior to joining academia, Todd was a Senior Computer Architect in Intel's Microcomputer Research Labs, a product-oriented research laboratory in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Todd is the first to take credit (but the last to accept blame) for creating the SimpleScalar Tool Set, a popular collection of computer architecture performance analysis tools. Todd is co-author (with Andrew Tanenbaum) of the undergraduate computer architecture textbook, "Structured Computer Architecture, 6th Ed." In addition to his work in academia, Todd is founder and President of SimpleScalar LLC and co-founder of InTempo Design LLC. In 2002, Todd was a Sloan Research Fellow, and in 2007 he received the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for "innovative contributions in Computer Architecture including the SimpleScalar Toolkit and the DIVA and Razor architectures." Todd received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1996.