Speaker: David Wentzlaff, Princeton University
Date: 12/5/2016, 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Location: 380, Soda Hall
Title: Processors for the Data Center and Cloud of the Future
Abstract: Current-day data centers and IaaS clouds (e.g. Amazon EC2, MS Azure, Google GCE) use microprocessors that are very similar to or the same as those used in small servers and desktops. This work rethinks the design of microprocessors specifically for data center use along with how microprocessors are affected by the novel economic models that have been popularized by IaaS clouds. This talk will describe several architectural changes including how a processor can be decomposed into sub-components (e.g. ALU, Cache, Fetch Unit) that can be individually rented in IaaS clouds, how running similar programs can be taken advantage of in the data center, how architectural features such as the flavor of memory bandwidth (bursty vs. bulk) can be provisioned and sold in the data center, and novel memory architectures that enable the creation of sub-coherence domains of cache coherence across the data center.
More info: http://engineering.berkeley.edu/processors-data-center-and-cloud-future-2016-12-05