ICSA Faculty Talk - 16/01/2020

TITLE

Don’t Settle for Less, Fully Exploit Emerging Hardware with New System Software

ABSTRACT

Today, computer architectures are drifting away from the von Neumann model. Computers, from mobile devices to servers in the data-center, are increasingly built with a multitude of different general-purpose, special-purpose, and even reconfigurable processing units – which share memory, have their own memory, or are tightly integrated with memory, such as near data processors. Moreover, IO is becoming faster and faster. This hardware (r)evolution, which is the response of computer architects to the growing applications’ demands, clearly affects fundamental assumptions on which the software we are using today is built upon.

With changing computer hardware, system software (hypervisor, operating system, compiler, and runtime library) can play an essential role to enable application software to fully exploit emerging computer architectures, while minimizing application complexity. Thus, potentially improving not only performance, energy efficiency, resource utilization, security, and fault-tolerance, but also programmability and portability. However, system software did not change much since decades.

This talk walks through Antonio Barbalace’s previous and current research on operating systems and compilers presenting how new system software designs can improve the scalability of parallel hardware, the programmability of heterogeneous compute units, and the performance and energy efficiency of near data processing platform – while reducing applications’ complexity.