CS Seminar: Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines

CS Seminar: Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines
Speaker: Dr. Onur Mutlu, Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich
Date: Friday, November 13, 2020
Time: 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. (CST)
Location: https://txstate.zoom.us/s/99000501845

Abstract:
Computing is bottle-necked by data. Large amounts of application data overwhelm storage capability, communication capability, and computation capability of the modern machines we design today. As a
result, many key applications' performance, efficiency and scalability are bottle-necked by data movement. We describe three major shortcomings of modern architectures in terms of 1) dealing with data,
2) taking advantage of the vast amounts of data, and 3) exploiting different semantic properties of application data. We argue that an intelligent architecture should be designed to handle data well. We show that handling data well requires designing architectures based on three key principles: 1) data-centric, 2) data-driven, 3) data-aware. We give several examples for how to exploit each of these principles to design a much more efficient and high performance computing system. We will especially discuss recent research that aims to fundamentally reduce memory latency and energy, and practically enable computation close to data, with at least two promising novel directions: 1) performing massively-parallel bulk operations in memory by exploiting the analog operational properties of memory, with low-cost changes, 2) exploiting the logic layer in 3D-stacked memory technology in various ways to accelerate important data-intensive applications. We discuss how to enable adoption of such fundamentally more intelligent architectures, which we believe are key to efficiency, performance, and sustainability. We conclude with some guiding principles for future computing architecture and system designs. Throughout the talk, we will point out how open source hardware can enable innovation in and adoption of the paradigms we introduce.

Bio:

Dr. Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously held the Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current broader research interests are in computer architecture, systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. A variety of techniques he, along with his group and collaborators, has invented over the years have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory/storage systems. He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held various product and research positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, and Google. He received the IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Young Computer Architect Award, the inaugural Intel Early Career Faculty Award, US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Carnegie Mellon University Ladd Research Award, faculty
partnership awards from various companies, and a healthy number of best paper or "Top Pick" paper recognitions at various computer systems, architecture, and hardware security venues. He is an ACM
Fellow "for contributions to computer architecture research, especially in memory systems", IEEE Fellow for "contributions to computer architecture research and practice", and an elected member of
the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials are freely available on YouTube, and his research group makes a wide variety of
software and hardware artifacts freely available online. For more information, please see his webpage at
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.