Events Calendar

10x10: A New Paradigm for Computer Architecture (Meeting the Challenges of the New Technology Scaling Landscape)

Speaker: Dr. Andrew A. Chien, Adjunct Professor, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego

Talk Title: 10x10: A New Paradigm for Computer Architecture (Meeting the Challenges of the New Technology Scaling Landscape)

Abstract: Two decades of microprocessor architecture enabled by transistor scaling in density, speed, and energy delivered 1000-fold performance improvement, enabling computing as we know it today – tiny, powerful, inexpensive, and therefore ubiquitous. Recent semiconductor process generations and technology projections suggest future scaling in density, but only decreasing improvements in transistor speed and energy. In this era of energy-constrained performance, the industry has undertaken a shift to rapidly increasing parallelism (multicore). This shift is broad based, including essentially all computers – smart phones, laptops, cloud data centers, and supercomputers.

In the new technology scaling landscape, more narrowly specialized designs (heterogeneity) become more attractive and have attracted much study, but computer architects have lacked a paradigm to deal with it systematically. We believe it is time to move beyond the general purpose architecture paradigm and 90/10 optimization which has served us well for 25 years, and replace it with a new paradigm, “10x10”, which divides workloads into clusters, enabling systematic exploitation of specialization in the architecture, implementation, and software. We believe such 10x10 can enable 10x improvement in energy efficiency and performance compared to conventional approaches. We call this new paradigm “10x10” because it divides the workloads and optimizes for 10 different 10% cases, not a monolithic 90/10. We will outline the critical challenges to this approach and implications for future computing systems.

Biography: Dr. Andrew A. Chien is former Vice President of Research of Intel Corporation. He served as a Vice President of Intel Labs and Intel Research / Future Technologies Research where he led a “bold, edgy” research agenda in disruptive technologies. Chien has launched imaginative new efforts in robotics, wireless power, sensing and perception, nucleic acid sequencing, networking, cloud, and ethnography. Working with external partners, Chien was instrumental in creation of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC) focused on parallel software and Open Cirrus Consortium focused on Cloud computing.

For more than 20 years, Chien has been a global leader in research and education. Chien’s previous positions include the Science Applications International Corporation Endowed Chair Professor in the department of computer science and engineering, and created the Center for Networked Systems at the University of California at San Diego. While at UCSD, he also founded Entropia, a widely-known Internet Grid computing startup. From 1990 to 1998, Chien was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with joint appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he was a research leader for parallel computing software and hardware, and developed the well-known Fast Messages, HPVM, and Windows NT Supercluster systems.

Dr. Chien is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and has published over 130 technical papers. Chien currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA), Advisory Board of the National Science Foundation’s Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, and Editorial Board of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM). Chien received his Bachelor's in electrical engineering, Master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Host: Sr Assoc Dean Timothy Pinkston

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher