Aviral Shrivastava: Teaching
CSE 591: Low-Power and Parallel Computing
Course Objective: To develop a technique to
improve processor efficiency and submit the paper to an international conference
Course Abstract
For the past 4 decades performance has been the main driver behind the
evolution of processor architectures.
However, relentless technology scaling has brought us to a point,
where the power consumption has become the main design concern of
system designers.
The processor market is now increasingly being classified in terms of
power consumption rather than performance.
For example, you can hear processor companies talk about their desire
to have a processor in the sub-watt range.
This course will quickly gloss over the basic process-level,
transistor-level, and circuit level techniques for power redcution.
We will spend some time on methods of power characterization and
estimation at the microarchitecture level.
Our concentration will be on solutions to the power problem at the
microarchitecture, compiler and system level.
The projects will involve proposing and implementing novel power
optimization technique.
The ultimate metric of success in this class will be publishable
quality work.
Pre-requisites
Must have done computer architecture course equivalent to CSE
420.
Courses in operating systems, digital system design, and parallel
programming are preferable.
Course Contents
- Motivation for Power-Efficient Computing (1 week)
- Short Tutorial on Computer Architecture (1 week)
- Power and Thermal Estimation (1 week)
- Circuit-Level and Microarchitectural Techniques for Power Reduction (1 week)
- Multicore Architectures: Shared memory multicores(2 week)
- Multicore Architectures: Non-cache coherent multicores (2 week)
- Multicore Architectures: Software controlled memory multicores (2 week)
- GPU Computing (1 week)
- Accelerated Computing (2 week)
- Reliabile Computing in the Multicore era(1 week)
Course Structure
- Classroom: This course is organized as a discussion course with
each class meeting allocated to the discussion of a particular topic.
Before each meeting, all students are expected to read three or four
papers describing recent research on that topic.
Two student will be responsible for leading each discussion and one
student will be a scribe for each meeting, responsible for recording
and writing up the discussion.
- There will be two programming assignments, the first one simple,
just to get started, and the second one will be the main.
The focus will be on novel and useful microarchitectural,compiler, or
system level idea for power reduction.
- There will be no homework assignments and no exams.
Grading
- Paper presentation: 20%
- Class participation: 10%
- Project 1 - Report (1-2 page): 10%
- Project 1 - Software Demo: 10%
- Project 2 - Proposal (1-2 page): 10%
- Project 2 - Paper (6-10 page): 20%
- Project 2 - Software Demo: 20%