"The Multicore Revolution: Challenges and Opportunities"
Mary Jane Irwin

Moores Law continues to hold resulting in a doubling of the number transistors integrated on a single chip every two years. However, thermal issues and global interconnect speed issues have made it impossible to use this plethora of transistors in the design of a single, advanced processor that runs at a faster clock rate to provide a doubling of performance. However, two processors running at the slower clock rate will fit on todays chips and will provide, in theory, this doubling of performance. Soon, four core chips will appear on the market. This talk will focus on the challenges and research opportunities brought about by the multi-core revolution that is upon us. These include architectural challenges (e.g., global interconnect options), resiliency challenges (e.g., faulty cores due to soft error upsets, process variation, aging effects, thermal hot spots), on-chip memory hierarchy design (e.g., NUCA), power/energy challenges, and programming challenges. Some initial research results that give insight into several of these challenge area will be presented. Ultimately, multi-core computing resources (time, space, communication) and emerging computing resources (power, resiliency, security) will have to be cooperatively managed by the programmer, by the run-time system, by the compilation system, and by dynamic controls in the underlying circuitry.

Bio:

Mary Jane Irwin has been on the faculty at Penn State since 1977 where she currently holds the title of Evan Pugh Professor and A. Robert Noll Chair in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Her research and teaching interests include computer architecture, embedded and high performance computing systems design, power and reliability aware design, and emerging technologies in computing systems. Dr. Irwin received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. She received an Honorary Doctorate from Chalmers University, Sweden, in 1997, was named a Fellow of The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) in 1995, a Fellow of The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1996, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. Dr. Irwin is currently serving on ACM's Publications Board, on the Board on Army Science and Technology, and as a member of the Computing Research Associations (CRA)-W Steering Committee. In the past she has served as a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM's Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems and as Editor-in-Chief of ACM's Transactions on the Design Automation of Electronic Systems, as an elected member of the CRAs Board of Directors, of the IEEE Computer Society's Board of Governors, of ACM's Council, and as Vice President of ACM.