Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:
Friday, August 19, 2005
Time:
1:00pm-2:00pm
Location:
50A-5132
Seminar Speaker:
Kunle Olukotun and Christos Kozyrakis
Computer Systems Lab
Stanford University
http://csl.stanford.edu
Title:
Stanford FARM
Abstract:
In this talk we will motivate and describe the architecture of the Flexible Architecture Research Machine (FARM). FARM is designed to improve the capability of architects and applications developers to experiment with large-scale parallel systems. The goal of FARM is to develop new insights from experiments that combine innovative computer systems and demanding scientific applications running on large data sets at full speed and at large scale.

FARM is a scalable system based on commercial high-density blade server technology from IBM. The components of each blade are an IBM CELL processor chip, a Xilinx Virtex4 FPGA chip, an Infiband network interface and 8 GB of high bandwidth DRAM. The FPGA adds configurability to the system which makes it possible to implement a number of architecture ideas such as NUMA shared memory, transactional memory, streaming, advanced prefetching, multithreading and specialized coprocessors.

Christos Kozyrakis is an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley where he was the architect for VIRAM, a media-processor that used vector parallelism and embedded DRAM technology. His current work focuses on multiprocessor architectures and programming models based on transactional memory. For more information visit http://csl.stanford.edu/~christos.

Kunle Olukotun is an Associate Professor at Stanford University. Olukotun received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of Michigan. Olukotun led the Stanford Hydra single-chip multiprocessor research project, which developed a novel architecture for combining multiple processors on a single chip. One of the most innovative aspects of the Hydra architecture is the support for thread-level speculation. Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop commercial server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems; the Afara processor technology, called Niagara, is at the core of Sun's throughput computing initiative. Olukotun currently leads projects in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and formal hardware verification.

Sponsor of Seminar:
Kathy Yelick
Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov