Silicon Heterogeneity in the Cloud
Speaker
Babak Falsafi, EPFL, CH
Abstract
Cloud providers are building infrastructure at unprecedented speeds. We have witnessed the emergence of data-centric information technology in almost every aspect of our life from commerce, healthcare, entertainment, governance to scientific discovery. The demand for processing, communicating and storing data has grown faster than conventional growth in digital platforms. Meanwhile the conventional silicon technologies we have relied on for the past several decades leading to the exponential growth in IT have slowed down (the conventional 40%/year increase in density has dropped to 17%/year in recent years) . In light of this increase in demand on data-centric IT and the diminishing returns in platform scalability, our future increasingly relies on emerging technologies that introduce heterogeneity in both logic and memory. In this talk, I will motivate the grand challenges in scaling digital platforms and data-centric technologies, then present opportunities for pushing the envelope on server architecture in the post-Moore era.