Wednesday, 3 July 2013
Dr. Eric Rotenberg Receives Award For Research by the National Science Foundation
Dr. Eric Rotenberg
Dr. Eric Rotenberg has been awarded $350,000 by the National Science Foundation for research on SHF: Small: Design for Competitive Automated Layout (DCAL) of Mobile Application Processor.
The award will run from August 1st, 2012 to July 31st, 2015.
Research Abstract
For two decades, personal computers and servers have been powered by increasingly sophisticated superscalar processors. The last few years has even witnessed the introduction of superscalar processors into smart phones and tablet PCs, in order to provide richer user experiences. There are important trends in both domains: server-class processors require unsustainable design effort, as evidenced by a select few, highly trained, large design teams in industry proliferating superscalar processors; mobile devices are evolving at an extraordinary pace. These trends suggest it is time to take a radical departure in the way superscalar processors are designed. In particular, the PI proposes superscalar processor design automation. This project explores challenges and solutions at key levels:
Automatic FPGA-based processor-in-system exploration Efficient and automatic ISA/microarchitecture decoupling Automatic RTL generation via a superscalar design language A low-effort physical design strategy and alternative to custom design.
Franzon, Rotenberg, Davis, Tuck and Zhou Launch New Work on More Efficient Computers using 3DIC Technology
(L to R) Franzon, Rotenberg, Davis, Tuck & Zhou
Dr. Paul D. Franzon, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State, is launching an initiative to develop a computer that utilizes three-dimensional integrated chip (3DIC) technology and is significantly more energy efficient than anything else on the market today. The work is supported by $1 million in funding as Phase 1 of a negotiated $4 million cooperative agreement contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
"Computers are becoming faster and able to tackle more complex challenges, but they are also consuming larger amounts of electrical power," says Franzon, lead researcher under the DARPA cooperative agreement. "For example, the amount of computing power in unmanned vehicles is limited by the power supply they can carry."
To address that challenge, the NC State research team is tasked with designing a multiprocessor computer system that has a computing-to-power ratio of 75 gigaflops per watt. That means the system must be able to process 75 billion floating point operations per second for every watt of power used. By contrast, the most efficient processors currently on the market have a computing-to-power ratio of 16 gigaflops per watt.
"We plan to use 3DIC technology and heterogeneous computing techniques to develop what will essentially be a highly-efficient multiprocessor that would fit in a matchbox," Franzon says.
Franzon is the primary investigator (PI) under the cooperative agreement, which has negotiated options through 2017. The co-PIs, all of whom are also on faculty at NC State, are: Dr. Eric Rotenberg, professor of electrical and computer engineering; Dr. Rhett Davis, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; Dr. James Tuck, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Dr. Huiyang Zhou, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Tuesday, 2 July 2013
Eric Rotenberg Inducted into the MICRO Hall of Fame
Dr. Eric Rotenberg
Dr. Eric Rotenberg, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State University, has been inducted into the "MICRO Hall of Fame" which recognizes authors who have published eight or more papers in MICRO over its 45 years of existence. Currently, 39 authors have achieved this distinction - http://newsletter.sigmicro.org/micro-hof.txt/view.
MICRO is the flagship conference for microprocessor architecture and one of the four top-tier computer architecture conferences. MICRO-45 had 228 submissions of which 40 were accepted after a rigorous review process including rebuttal and shepherding phases.
"Just as IEEE has grassroots 'Technical Committees (TC)' on various technical specialties, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) has analogous 'Special Interest Groups (SIG)'" says Rotenberg.
SIGMICRO is ACM's Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture. They co-sponsor several premier computer architecture conferences, including MICRO. The award that Dr. Rotenberg received is sponsored by ACM SIGMICRO, but is in fact related to the MICRO Conference.
Dr. Rotenberg has published papers on topics such as new paradigms for exploiting instruction-level parallelism (ILP), novel high-performance processors, automating superscalar processor design, and more, with his first MICRO paper being published in 1996.
According to Dr. Rotenberg, "'Microarchitecture' deals with the design of microprocessors, memory systems, etc., that can be found in all computers, including smart phones and other handheld devices, laptops and PCs, Cloud data centers, and supercomputers."
The paper, "Control-Flow Decoupling," that put Dr. Rotenberg over the top was co-authored by Rotenberg, Rami Sheikh, and Dr. James Tuck. Sheikh is a PHD student who is being advised by Dr. Rotenberg and Dr. Tuck is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State University.
More information about MICRO can be found at the MICRO Conference Website.