D-INFK Distinguished Colloquium - Wen-Mei Hwu: Innovative Applications and Technology Pivots – A Perfect Storm in Computing

Date: 30 April 2018

Time: 16:15 - 17:15

Place: ETH Zurich, main campus CAB G 61

Speaker: Prof. Wen-Mei Hwu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Host: Prof. Onur Mutlu

ABSTRACT:

We have been experiencing two very important developments in computing. On the one hand, a tremendous amount of resources have been invested into innovative applications such as first-principle based models, deep learning and cognitive computing. On the other hand, the industry has been taking a technological path where traditional scaling is coming to an end and application performance and power efficiency vary by more than two orders of magnitude depending on their parallelism, heterogeneity, and locality. A “perfect storm” is beginning to form from the fact that data movement has become the dominating factor for both power and performance of high-valued applications. It will be critical to match the compute throughput to the data access bandwidth and to locate the compute at where the data is. Much has been and continuously needs to be learned about of algorithms, languages, compilers and hardware architecture in this movement. What are the killer applications that may become the new diver for future technology development? How hard is it to program existing systems to address the date movement issues today? How will we program future systems? How will innovations in memory devices present further opportunities and challenges in designing new systems? What is the impact on long-term software engineering cost on applications (and legacy applications in particular)? In this talk, I will present some lessons learned as we design the IBM-Illinois C3SR Erudite system inside this perfect storm.

BIOGRAPHY:

Wen-mei W. Hwu is a Professor and holds the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also Chief Scientist of UIUC Parallel Computing Institute and director of the IMPACT research group (www.crhc.uiuc.edu/Impact). He co-directs the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) and serves as one of the principal investigators of the NSF Blue Waters Petascale supercomputer. For his contributions, he received the ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award, the ISCA Influential Paper Award, the IEEE Computer Society B. R. Rau Award and the Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science of the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. Dr. Hwu received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

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 D-INFK Distinguished Colloquium