Colloquium Computer Science - Prof. Luigi Carro, UFRGS

Title: Performance harvesting in the post Moore era

Abstract:

As long as Moore's law has been around, new computer applications have blossomed, and everyday life nowadays is strongly based on some sort of iteration with hidden or explicit computers. Technology scaling (or Moore's law) allowed integration of more devices, with benefits in speed and energy. As Moore's law loses steam, software development faces new challenges, because the lack of faster and more efficient processors can compromise the much needed evolution in new application domains like self driven vehicles and service automation. As the software problem increases, one must allow scalability of the hardware to solve a bigger problem in a constant time, or to solve the same problem in a shorter time, without changing the software base or requiring extensive software modifications. In this talk we will discuss Performance Harvesting, a way to sustain Moore's law even without technology help, for the next generation computer applications.

Short bio:

Luigi Carro received the Electrical Engineering and the MSc degrees from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, in 1985 and 1989, respectively. From 1989 to 1991 he worked at ST-Microelectronics, Agrate, Italy, in the R&D group. In 1996 he received the Dr. degree in the area of Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. He is presently a full professor at the Applied Informatics Department at the Informatics Institute of UFRGS, in charge of Computer Architecture and Organization. He has advised more than 20 graduate students, and has published more than 150 technical papers on those topics. He has authored the book Digital systems Design and Prototyping (2001-in Portuguese) and is the co-author of Fault-Tolerance Techniques for SRAM-based FPGAs (2006-Springer), Dynamic Reconfigurable Architectures and Transparent optimization Techniques (2010-Springer) and Adaptive Systems (Springer 2012). In 2007 he received the prize APERGS - Researcher of the year in Computer Science.