Events Calendar

Computing with Stochastic Processors: Embracing Errors in Architecture and Design of Processors and Applications

Speaker: Rakesh Kumar, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Talk Title: Computing with Stochastic Processors: Embracing Errors in Architecture and Design of Processors and Applications

Abstract: All of computing today relies on an abstraction where software expects the hardware to behave flawlessly for all inputs under all conditions. While the abstraction worked historically due to the relatively small magnitude of variations in hardware and environment, computing will increasingly be done with devices and circuits which are inherently stochastic or whose behavior is stochastic due to manufacturing and environmental uncertainties. For such emerging circuits/devices, the cost of maintaining the abstraction of flawless hardware will be prohibitive and we will need to fundamentally rethink the correctness contract between hardware and software. In our group, we are exploring a vision of computing systems where a) hardware and environmental variations are fully exposed to the highest layers of software in form errors, and b) hardware and software is optimized to maximize power savings afforded by relaxed correctness. We call the under-designed processors that produce stochastically correct results even under nominal conditions, stochastic processors. We call the applications that have been implemented to be adaptively error-tolerant, stochastic applications. In this talk, I will describe our recent approaches to architect and design stochastic processors and stochastic applications.

Biography: Rakesh Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He received a B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur in 2001 and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in September 2006. Prior to moving to Champaign in 2007, he was a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research at Redmond. His research interests are in computer architectures and programming models for emerging workloads, and computing in face of large scale errors. His research has been recognized by an Arnold O Beckman Research Award - 2009, FAA Creative Research Award - 2008, Intel Research Council Award - 2007-2009, UCSD CSE Best Dissertation Award - 2007, and an IBM PhD Fellowship 2005.

Host: Melvin A. Breuer

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 222

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Annie Yu