Guest Speaker

Adapting to Hardware Uncertainty: Virtualization for the Multicore Era

Philip M. Wells
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin - Madison

Feb 21 2008 3:30PM
480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are invited to attend.
Refreshments will be served prior to the talk.

Abstract:

As predicted by Moore's Law, future generations of multicore processors will provide an ever-growing pool of hardware resources. However, the characteristics and configuration of these resources will be constantly varying due to reliability challenges, changing software requirements, and many other factors. This "dynamic heterogeneity" will lead to uncertainty in how software can and should use these resources at any particular moment.

I will discuss our proposed multicore virtualization, which relieves system and application software from the burden of this uncertainty, while enabling innovative hardware techniques for adapting to and exploiting dynamic heterogeneity. I will then focus on two such techniques for managing reliability. By exploring these, and many other issues of future multicore processors, I believe computer architects can continue to make effective use of the additional resources provided by Moore's Law.

Host: Gagan Agrawal

* Philip M. Wells is a CSE faculty candidate