The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Good engineering practice uses the characteristics of existing technologies to optimize implementation. Often, this will mean that design techniques optimal in a previous generation prove impractical or even unusable when a new technology becomes dominant. This rule is all too often forgotten, which we will demonstrate in two problems of computer design: Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and hardware prefetchers (providing the ability to fetch data early in anticipation of the need). FPGAs are extremely useful in mobile embedded systems where computing power and energy considerations are major concerns. Partial reconfiguration is often used to reduce power consumption when parts of the array are inactive, albeit at the cost of high energy overhead due to the large cost of transferring configuration information. Our study reveals that partial reconfiguration accelerates execution and reduces overall energy consumption by half. Second, we will demonstrate how increased transistor integration allows hardware prefetching to improve both energy-efficiency and performance.

Short Bio:
Jean-Luc Gaudiot received the Diplôme d'Ingénieur from ESIEE, Paris, France in 1976 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA in 1977 and 1982, respectively. He is currently Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC, Irvine. Prior to joining UCI in 2002, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California since 1982. His research interests include multithreaded architectures, fault-tolerant multiprocessors, and implementation of reconfigurable architectures. He has published over 250 journal and conference papers. His research has been sponsored by NSF, DoE, and DARPA, as well as a number of industrial companies. He has served the community in various positions and was just elected to the presidency of the IEEE Computer Society for 2017.