Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

4:30 PM, Wednesday, October 10, 2018
NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building Room B3
http://ee380.stanford.edu

New Golden Age for Computer Architecture:
Domain-Specific Hardware/Software Co-Design, Enhanced Security, Open Instruction Sets, and Agile Chip Development

John Hennessy, Alphabet
David Patterson, Google (in absensia)

About the talk:

In the 1980s, Mead and Conway democratized chip design and high-level language programming surpassed assembly language programming, which made instruction set advances viable. Innovations like RISC, superscalar, multilevel caches, and speculation plus compiler advances (especially in register allocation) ushered in a Golden Age of computer architecture, when performance increased annually by 60%. In the later 1990s and 2000s, architectural innovation decreased, so performance came primarily from higher clock rates and larger caches. The ending of Dennard Scaling and Moore's Law also slowed this path; single core performance improved only 3% last year! In addition to poor performance gains of modern microprocessors, Spectre recently demonstrated timing attacks that leak information at high rates. We're on the cusp of another Golden Age that will significantly improve cost, performance, energy, and security. These architecture challenges are even harder given that we've lost the exponentially increasing resources provided by Dennard scaling and Moore's law. We've identified areas that are critical to this new age.

Turing lecture presented at 2018 ACM/IEEE 45th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) and published in the Proceedings.

About the Speaker

[speaker photo]

John L. Hennessy, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, served as President of Stanford University from September 2000 until August 2016. In 2017, he initiated the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, the largest fully endowed graduate-level scholarship program in the world, and he currently serves as Director of the program.

Hennessy joined Stanford's faculty in 1977. In 1981, he drew together researchers to focus on a technology known as RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), which revolutionized computing by increasing performance while reducing costs. Hennessy helped transfer this technology to industry cofounding MIPS Computer Systems in 1984. He served as chair of Computer Science, dean of the School of Engineering, and university provost before being appointed as Stanford's 10th president. As president he focused on increasing financial aid and on developing new initiatives in multidisciplinary research and teaching. He was the founding board chair of Atheros Communications, one of the early developers of WiFi technology, and has served on the board of Cisco and Alphabet (Google's parent company). He is the coauthor of two internationally used textbooks in computer architecture.

His honors include the 2012 Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the ACM Turing Award (jointly with David Patterson). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Royal Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society. Hennessy earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University and his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the Stony Brook University.

Due to a scheduling conflict, Dave Patterson will not be presenting.

[speaker photo] David A. Patterson is a Distinguished Engineer at Google and serves as Vice Chair of the Board of the RISC-V Foundation, which offers an open free instruction set architecture with the aim to enable a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. Patterson was Professor of Computer Science at UC, Berkeley from 1976 to 2016. He received his Bachelor's, Master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Patterson's numerous honors include the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (with Hennessy), the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award (with Hennessy), the Richard A. Tapia Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing, and the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Patterson served as ACM President from 2004 to 2006. He is a Fellow of ACM, AAAS and IEEE, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.