About pittCAST

Low-power techniques and design methodologies are a stringent requirement in building modern computer systems. Power issues span widely, from longer battery life for portable devices to packaging and thermal design cost for high-performance processors, and even to environmental considerations. To build a power-efficient computer system, hardware and software should be considered together in a tightly integrated way, to aggressively remove any unnecessary activities at architecture and circuit levels. We are currently investigating techniques to achieve very low power processing of media data. We are also looking at reducing power consumption due to leakage current in high-performance microprocessors.

Computers are used as a workhorse or personal assistant to majority of people everyday. Possible systems failure due to various reasons, such as hardware failure, software bugs, and unsolicited attacks from outside, can cause a tremendous damage to an individual, an organization, or to an indefinite number of people. Designing a computer system with effective shielding for higher availability becomes critically important. Our goal is to devise effective yet efficient architectural techniques to facilitate powerful shielding of computer systems.

We have witnessed for the last several decades an astounding trend of technology advances. Today's CPUs sitting inside commodity desktop PCs can execute multi-billion instructions in a single second! The exponential technology improvement rate, commonly referred to as the Moore's Law, has spawned many excisting, previously unrealizable applications, including photo-realistic 3-D games. The technology advances on the other hand expose interesting new research issues at the same time. To exploit the bulk transistors available on chip, new CPU architectures employing multiple small processors are being sought, for example. Overcoming relatively slow on-chip interconnect delay has become a serious concern for CPU designers. More frequent soft errors due to small feature sizes and a lower operating voltage must be taken into account. How to mitigate the initial development cost of complex processors is also of great interest. We'd like to explore the impact of the technology advances on the computer architecture and systems. Especially, we are interested in building computer systems that best exploit new technologies.

Computer engineering is a process with two major aspects: design and evaluation of the design. An accurate yet fast evaluation of a given computer system is a crucial step to understand the system and to improve it. Using various hardware and software techniques for evaluating computer systems' performance, we'd like to uncover previously unknown or neglected aspects of existing or proposed designs, in order to provide further optimizations. Our current focus is on the memory system of high-performance processors and embedded processors for media applications.