Distinguished Lecturer Series

PicoServer - Building a Compact Energy Efficient Multiprocessor

Trevor Mudge

Bredt Family Professor of Engineering The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Friday, September 19, 2008
10:30am - SENSQ 5317

Refreshments/meet the speaker at 10:00am

Hosted by Rami Melhem

Abstract

With power and cooling becoming an increasingly costly part of the operating budget of a server, the old trend of striving for higher performance with little regard for power is over. Emerging semiconductor process technologies, multicore architectures, and new interconnect technology provide an avenue for future servers to become low power, compact, and possibly mobile. In talk we examine two techniques for achieving low power: 1)3D die stacking; and 2) replacing DRAM with Flash memory. 3D die stacking technology can bond multiple dies together vertically and provide millions of connections between layers. In this talk, we examine the case for a PicoServer, a multicore architecture using 3D stacking to implement a simple, low-power, high-performance server system. Secondly, we will show how Flash memory, a low power high density non-volatile memory technology, can be used to replace DRAM, lowering the power of the main memory, to further reduce power.

 

Biography of Speaker

Trevor Mudge received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1977. Since then, he has been at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He became the Bredt Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science after a ten year term as the Director of the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory - a group of about 10 faculty and 80 graduate students. He has co-authored numerous papers on computer architecture, programming languages, VLSI design. He has also chaired 33 theses. Trevor Mudge is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, the IET, and the British Computer Society.