The School of Computing & The Computer Science Graduate Student Organization (GSOCS) Present the Invited Speaker Series
Dr. David Wentzlaff
Princeton University
Processors for the Data Center and Cloud of the Future
Tuesday, November 1st at noon
Location: FA-258, Fine Arts Building
Abstract: Current-day data centers and IaaS clouds (e.g. Amazon EC2, MS Azure, Google GCE)
use microprocessors that are very similar to or the same as those used in small servers
and desktops. This work rethinks the design of microprocessors specifically for data
center use along with how microprocessors are affected by the novel economic models
that have been popularized by IaaS clouds. This talk will describe several architectural
changes including how a processor can be decomposed into sub-components (e.g. ALU,
Cache, Fetch Unit) that can be individually rented in IaaS clouds, how running similar
programs can be taken advantage of in the data center, how architectural features
such as the flavor of memory bandwidth (bursty vs. bulk) can be provisioned and sold
in the data center, and novel memory architectures that enable the creation of sub-coherence
domains of cache coherence across the data center.
This work has not only been simulated, but many of the discussed ideas have been implemented
in one of the largest academic processors ever built, the Princeton Piton Processor.
Piton is a 25-core manycore built in IBM's 32nm process technology containing over
460 Million transistors. This talk will discuss Piton along with what it takes to
tape-out a complex microprocessor in an academic setting. Last, Piton has been recently
open sourced as the OpenPiton (http://www.openpiton.org) project which is a expandable manycore platform which includes RTL, thousands of
tests, and implementation scripts. The talk will conclude by discussing how OpenPiton
is able to contribute to the burgeoning field of open source hardware.
Bio: David Wentzlaff is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Electrical Engineering Department. Before joining Princeton, he completed his PhD and MS at MIT and was Lead Architect and Founder of Tilera Corporation, a multicore chip manufacturer now owned by Mellanox. Before Tilera, he was one of the architects of the Raw Processor at MIT and designed the Raw on-chip networks. David founded the MIT Factored Operating System (fos) project which focused on designing scalable operating systems for thousand core multicores and cloud computers. His work has been awarded the NSF CAREER award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Prize, and the Princeton E. Lawrence Keyes Faculty Advancement Award. David teaches the world's first Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) in Computer Architecture offered through Coursera. David's current research interests include how to create manycore microprocessors customized specifically for future data centers and Cloud computing environments and how to reduce the impact of computing on the environment by optimizing computer architecture for fully biodegradable substrates. He enjoys hiking and mountaineering when not designing multicore processors.
