“I’m really excited about the center because it brings together my research group very nicely,” Gavrilovska said. “One part of my group was always focused on the impact of new hardware on the systems software stack, such as new types of memories or accelerators. Another part was developing systems software technologies for edge computing. In the context of the ADA Center work, we’re looking at how we can best utilize emerging hardware for workloads and the system software stack in edge computing.”

Now that transistors are no longer expected to double on microchips every year, specializing hardware design for a specific use case is one way to improve performance in future platforms. The goal of the ADA Center is to make the specialization process more scalable and efficient to ultimately lessen the impact of the slowdown in Moore’s law.

Funding emerging technologies is one of the main purposes of the ADA Center’s backer, the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The nonprofit combines governmental and corporate funds to research pre-complete technologies.