Lecture: Mary Jean Harrold Memorial Distinguished Lecture

Where: MiRC Room 102 A&B

When: 1:30 p.m.

Title: A “Post-ISA” Era in Computer Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract:

For decades, Moore’s Law and its partner Dennard Scaling have driven technology trends that have enabled exponential performance improvements in computer systems at manageable power dissipation.  With the slowing of Moore/Dennard improvements, designers have turned to a range of approaches for extending scaling of computer systems performance and power efficiency.  Unfortunately, these scaling gains come at the expense of degraded hardware-software abstraction layers, increased complexity at the hardware-software interface, and increased challenges for software reliability, interoperability, and performance portability.  This talk will explore the way forward for computer systems designers in this “Post-Instruction Set Architecture” era of shifting abstractions.  The talk will cover hardware and software design opportunities, methods for formal verification, and a look into the role of future technologies including Quantum Computing. 

Bio:
Margaret Martonosi is the Hugh Trumbull Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where she has been on the faculty since 1994. She is also currently Director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. Martonosi's research interests are in computer architecture and mobile computing, with particular focus on power-efficient systems. Her work has included the development of the Wattch power modeling tool and the Princeton ZebraNet mobile sensor network project for the design and real-world deployment of zebra tracking collars in Kenya. Her current research focuses on hardware-software interface issues in complex, heterogeneous parallelism. Her group also works on tool flows and design approaches for quantum computers. Martonosi is a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM. Notable awards include the 2010 Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award, the 2013 Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award,  and “Test of Time” paper awards from International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ACM SIGMOBILE, and ACM SenSys. Martonosi currently co-chairs CRA-W, an organization previously co-chaired by Mary Jean Harrold, and has fond memories of working with her on many CRA-W programs.