[Colloquium] Mihai Budiu on Friday, April 30, 2004

[Margery Ishmael]

A JOINT TALK - DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
& TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE IN CHICAGO

Date: Friday, April 30, 2004
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251

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Speaker:  MIHAI BUDIU, Carnegie Mellon University

Speaker's Homepage: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/

Title: Spatial Computation Computing Without General-Purpose Processors

Abstract:

 In this talk I explore the strengths and weaknesses of Spatial 
Computation (SC), a method of translating programs into hardware by 
assigning to each program instruction a dedicated hardware 
implementation. SC synthesizes circuits with ample parallelism, using 
mostly local communication. SC addresses many of the limitations of 
contemporary high-performance processor architectures: limited ability 
to exploit parallelism, reliance on slow global communication signals, 
design complexity, inflexibility of the instruction-set architecture, 
low energy efficiency, increasing power consumption.

I will present compilation technologies developed for two spatial 
architectures: PipeRench (virtualized hardware) and ASH 
(Application-Specific Hardware). Program transformations developed for 
these architectures have broad applicability in the realms of 
traditional compilation, high-level synthesis and asynchronous 
circuits. This talk will focus on CASH: a compiler for ASH, which 
translates ANSI C programs into asynchronous hardware circuits. 
Circuits generated by CASH from dusty-deck C multimedia kernels compare 
favorably in performance with high-end superscalar microprocessors, 
while being up to three orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of 
energy and energy-delay.

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Host: John Reppy

*Refreshments will follow the talk in Ryerson 255*

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.