Seminar 1, 2017-12-15

Date: 2017-12-15
Time: 15:00-16:00
Speaker: Prof. Babak Falsafi, EPFL, Switzerland

Title: Server Architecture for the Post-Moore Era

Abstract
Datacenters are growing at unprecedented speeds fueled by the demand on global IT services, investments in massive data analytics and economies of scale. Worldwide data by some accounts (e.g., IDC) grows at much higher rates than server capability and capacity. Conventional silicon technologies laying the foundation for server platforms, however, have dramatically slowed down in efficiency and density scaling in recent years. The latter, now referred to as the post-Moore era, has given rise to a plethora of emerging logic and memory technologies presenting exciting new challenges and abundant opportunities from algorithms to platforms for server designers. In this talk, I will first motivate the post-Moore era for server architecture and present avenues to pave the path forward for server design.

Bio
Babak is a Professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the founding director of the EcoCloud research center at EPFL. He has worked on server architecture for some time with contributions impacting industrial products and platforms including the WildFire/WildCat family of multiprocessors by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), memory system technologies in IBM BlueGene and ARM cores and server evaluation methodologies in use by AMD, HPE and Google (PerfKit). His recent work on scale-out server processor design lays the foundation for Cavium ThunderX. He is a fellow of ACM and IEEE.