Logo: University of Southern California

Murali Annavaram Receives NSF CAREER Grant

The NSF award will support research on processor reliability in integrated circuit technology
Gloria Hayes
August 12, 2010 —

Murali Annavaram, of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, is the most recent of the Viterbi School’s young faculty to be awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.

The CAREER grant supports the early professional development activities of faculty who most effectively integrate research and education within their academic institutions.

Annavaram's research interests are in computer and mobile platform architecture, wireless systems and networks and VLSI design. He is addressing the challenges of processor reliability in current and future silicon integrated circuit technology.

Although computer system performance continues to increase while costs decrease, shrinking device sizes have recently led to new challenges in system reliability. Rather than addressing a single reliability concern, such as soft errors or process variations, Annavaram takes a multi-dimensional approach to improve Mean-Time-To-Failure.

He focuses on error monitoring, detection and correction in a hierarchical framework based on reliability needs, and describes several design and software solutions to address these problems. The results are broadly applicable to enhanced computing, ranging from high performance industrial systems to personal consumer products.

“This grant enables my research group to answer fundamental challenges to processor reliability,” says Annavaram. “We will be able to conduct a comprehensive study that spans from microarchitecture solutions to software modifications to increase processor's mean time to failure.”

Annavaram will use the NSF funding to support his project entitled “From Nonstop-Monitoring to Nano-ISA: An Adaptive Multi-Dimensional Framework for Processor Reliability.”

“I am thrilled that Murali has been honored with a CAREER award," said Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. “It is a testament to his versatile and enabling research. We are very pleased that he is part of our faculty. ”

“Our faculty joins me in congratulating Murali on his receipt of an NSF CAREER grant and its recognition of his research accomplishments in computer architecture and VLSI reliability,” added EE Systems chair Alexander A. (Sandy) Sawchuk.

Annavaram received his B.Tech. degree in computer science from the National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India in 1993; his M.S. in computer science and engineering from Colorado State University in 1996, and his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan in 2001. 

He was a senior research scientist at Intel Microprocessor Research Lab (MRL) in Austin, TX from 2001 through 2007, and a visiting faculty researcher at the Nokia Palo Alto Research Center in 2007. He joined the USC and the Hsieh Department’s Computer Engineering division in 2007.