Research Hardware Systems

Hardware SystemsResearch

Hardware-related research at the University of Michi-

gan is conducted mainly within the Advanced Com-

puter Architecture Laboratory (ACAL), founded in

1985 and comprising a multidisciplinary group of

researchers working in the primary areas of computer

architecture, computer-aided design, and VLSI.

ACAL researchers explore theoretical, experimental,

and applied aspects of computer design within a

broad spectrum of areas ranging from digital logic

and VLSI design, to architecture, CAD, design verifi-

cation, low power design, and up to compilers and

operating systems.

Comprising 14 faculty members and approximately

70 graduate students, the Lab receives generous

support from several sponsors, including industry

(ARM, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Intel,…) and the federal

government (ARO, DARPA, DoE, GSRC, NSF, SRC,…).

ACAL has strong ties to its alumni who have gone on

to key positions in industry and in academia, includ-

ing CMU, UIUC, Stanford, AMD, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel,

Microsoft, Oracle, Synopsys, etc.

Bob and Betty Beyster Building2260 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121cse.umich.edu

Led by Prof. Todd Austin.

KEY FACULTY AWARDS:

Led by Prof. Trevor Mudge

Michigan #1 in hardware publications (Architecture, CAD, and VLSI) over past 10 years

5 faculty in the ISCA Hall of Fame (Austin, Davidson, Mahlke, Mudge, Wenisch)

3 faculty with DAC Prolific Author Award (Blaauw, Markov, Sylvester)

• CEDAEarlyCareerAward:Bertacco,Markov

• IntelEarlyCareerFacultyAward:Dutta

• ACMSIGDAOutstandingNewFacultyAward:Markov,Sylvester

• NSFCAREERAwards:Austin,Bertacco,Dick,Dutta,Fu,Mahlke,Markov,Narayanasamy,Papaefthymiou,Sylvester,Wenisch

• ACMSIGARCHMauriceWilkesAward:Austin

• ACM-IEEEEckert-MauchlyAward:Davidson

• GoogleResearchAward:Mars,Tang

• CoEEducationExcellenceAward:Austin,Bertacco,Mahlke,Mudge

• SloanFellows:Austin,Fu

• IEEETTTCLifetimeContributionMedal:Hayes

3facultyintheMICROHallofFame (Austin, Mahlke, Mudge)

International Symposium on Microarchitecture

CyclosSemiconductor

#1

RESEARCHCENTERS:

KEYRECOGNITIONS:

TECHTRANSFER:

ISCA

Hardware SystemsResearch

Bob and Betty Beyster Building2260 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121cse.umich.edu

MULTI-CORE AND PARALLEL SYSTEMSFaculty: Todd Austin, Valeria Bertacco, Scott Mahlke, JasonMars,TrevorMudge,SatishNarayanasamy, Lingjia Tang, Thomas Wenisch

ACAL research in this space addresses a broad range of issues of parallel systems: coherency protocols and memory consistency models, design for programmability and software reliability, GPGPUs, low power design, reliability, effective validation, and deterministic behavior. The faculty have already developed a number of key projects in this space and deployed their ideas in multi-core prototypes. A few examples include the post-silicon validation techniques for multi-core processors developed in Prof. Bertacco’s group, Prof. Narayanasamy’s deterministic replay techniques for parallel systems, multicore memory systems developed in Prof. Wenisch’s group, and the research in deterministic execution for parallel systems in Prof. Austin’s group. Prof Mudge’s group is working on building a massively parallel low-power system with with hunderds of layers of interconnected 3D stacked silicon

RELIABLE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSFaculty: Todd Austin, Valeria Bertacco, David Blaauw (ECE), John Hayes, Scott Mahlke, Igor Markov, SatishNarayanasamy

The continued scaling of silicon fabrication technology has led to significant reliability concerns which are quickly becoming a dominant design challenge. Design integrity is threatened by complexity challenges in the form of immense designs defying complete verification, and physical challenges such as silicon aging and soft errors which impair correct system operation. ACAL researchers are addressing these key challenges through synergistic research vectors which range from near-term reliability stress reduction techniques to improve the quality of today’s silicon to longer-term technologies to detect, recover, and repair faulty systems. ACAL researchers are also working on in-situ detection of device wearout to enable adaptive reliability management. These efforts are supported and complemented by an active reliability modeling research effort and a strong focus on functional verification methodologies. The overarching goal is to provide highly effective and low-cost solutions to ensure both correctness and reliability in future designs, thereby extending the lifetime of silicon fabrication technologies.

LOW POWER DESIGNFaculty: Todd Austin, David Blaauw (ECE), Prabal Dutta, Trevor Mudge, Marios Papaefthymiou, Thomas Wenisch

Over the past decade, ACAL researchers have created some of the lowest-power designs. To name a few examples, the Razor project has won the Microprocessor Report’s Innovator of the Year Award in 2007 and is being deployed commercially, the Subliminal processor design, which was the lowest power microprocessor ever developed when it first appeared, and the first practical energy-recovery circuitry with sub-CV2 power consumption. Research in low-power circuits and architectures continues strong, spanning the entire spectrum from ultra-low-power subthreshold devices for deeply embedded applications to high-performance energy-recovery circuitry for multi-GHz processors. Furthermore, new explorations are underway in the space of data center architectures. In 2006, enterprise data centers consumed 61 billion kWh in US--1.5% of total US electricity consumption--more than all the nation’s color televisions combined. ACAL researchers have several efforts underway to improve data center energy efficiency, reliability, availability, and manageability. Specific research topics include novel energy-efficient processor architectures; system, cluster, and room-level power and thermal management; enterprise application benchmarking and performance analysis; memory and storage energy efficiency; virtualization and server consolidation; data-center-wide resource provisioning; capacity management; and system-level reliability.

VERIFICATION, TESTING AND PHYSICAL DESIGNFaculty: Valeria Bertacco, David Blaauw (ECE), John Hayes, Igor Markov, Marios Papaefthymiou, Karem Sakallah

ACAL includes one of the largest and broadest CAD and VLSI research programs in the nation. Research efforts span VLSI design, place and route solutions, logic design, testing, and verification and validation. Our faculty have made seminal contributions in the areas of timing analysis and optimization, formal verification, reliable design, automatic test generation, and low-power design. The group has an exceptional publication record, including numerous best paper awards at the most prestigious conferences and journals in the field. Among several other contributions, ACAL researchers have made numerous key contributions in this, including the breakthrough satisfiability solver GRASP, the runtime correctness architecture DIVA, and the placement tool CAPO. Current research is focusing on new directions in software verification, silicon piracy, and hardware security assurance.

Bob and Betty Beyster Building2260 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121cse.umich.edu

Hardware SystemsResearchCOMPILERS/OS - SYNERGY WITH ARCHITECTURESFaculty: Todd Austin, Peter Chen, Scott Mahlke, Jason Mars, SatishNarayanasamy,LingjiaTang

ACAL researchers are exploring a wide range of topics that utilize compiler and operating systems to optimize computing systems. For example, Prof. Mahlke’s Compilers Creating Custom Processors (CCCP) project is concerned with the design of customized processors, accelerators, and systems that deliver higher performance, lower power, and more reliability. The CCCP approach is to increase the efficiency of designs by customizing the hardware to the software that will run on the system. The focus is on building programmable systems, thus new compiler technology is required to automatically map applications onto the new hardware. Profs. Mahlke and Narayanasamy work on domain specific architectures and compilers, GPGPUs, medical imaging, etc. Profs. Chen, Flinn, and Narayanasamy explore problems at the interface of architecture, operating systems and program analysis, to help programmers write and maintain reliable parallel software. Specific projects include support for tolerating concurrency bugs, memory consistency models and deterministic replay.

EMBEDDED, NETWORKED, AND WIRELESS SYSTEMSFaculty: Robert Dick (ECE), Prabal Dutta, Scott Mahlke

Embedded systems are computers within devices not generally considered to be computers, e.g., vehicles, medical devices, smartphones, sensor networks, etc. The embedded systems market is growing 50% faster than that for general-purpose computing. Embedded system designers frequently face the problem of designing compact, complex, high-performance, inexpensive, low-power, real-time, reliable, secure, and wireless devices within a relatively very short time to market. ACAL research in this area covers the entire “stack,” from transistors and circuits to operating system and application software

VLSI DESIGNFaculty: David Blaauw (ECE), Prabal Dutta, John Hayes, Igor Markov, Marios Papaefthymiou

This area covers a wide range of topics and mixes applied research, supported by test chips and measurement results, with far reaching conceptual projects. In particular, the major topics currently under investigation include low-power design techniques, design for manufacturability (DFM), wire-centric design, clock-network synthesis and nanoscale CMOS mixed-signal design.

QUANTUM INFORMATION PROCESSINGFaculty: John Hayes, Igor Markov, Yaoyun Shi

Quantum information processing relies on atomic-scale properties of materials and particles to represent and manipulate information. Such processing is becoming increasingly relevant as some dimensions of CMOS transistors have reached those of several atoms, and several start-ups are already offering quantum-optical communication devices on the market. The group is studying architectures, circuits and algorithms for quantum information processing, as well as limitations of these revolutionary technologies. Research in this field combines expertise in computer architecture, design automation, algorithms, physics and theoretical computer science.

Bob and Betty Beyster Building2260 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121cse.umich.edu

Hardware SystemsResearch

AFFILIATED FACULTY

David Blaauw - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Mark Brehob - Computer Science and Engineering

Peter Chen - Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Software

Reetuparna Das - Computer Science and Engineering

Edward Davidson - Computer Science and Engineering

Robert Dick - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ron Dreslinski - Computer Science and Engineering

Kevin Fu - Computer Science and Engineering, Software

Dennis Sylvester - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Zhengya Zhang - Electrical and Computer Engineering

FACULTY IN HARDWARE SYSTEMS

Todd Austin Professor

austin4637 Beyster Bldg

Jason MarsAssistant Professor

profmars4705 Beyster Bldg

Valeria BertaccoAssociate Professor

valeria4645 Beyster Bldg

Pinaki MazumderProfessor mazum

4765 Beyster Bldg

Prabal DuttaAssistant Professor

prabal4773 Beyster Bldg

Trevor Mudge Bredt Family Professor

in Engineeringtnm

4757 Beyster Bldg

Satish Narayanasamy

Assistant Professor nsatish

4721 Beyster Bldg

John HayesClaude E. Shannon

Professor of Engineering Science

jhayes4713 Beyster Bldg

Marios Papaefthymiou

Professor and CSE Chair

marios3713 Beyster Bldg

Scott MahlkeProfessor and CSE

Associate Chair mahlke

4633 Beyster Bldg

Karem SakallahProfessor

karem4603 Beyster Bldg

Igor MarkovProfessor imarkov

4749 Beyster Bldg

Lingjia TangAssistant Professor

lingjia4609 Beyster Bldg

Thomas WenischAssociate Professor

twenisch4620 Beyster Bldg