EE380: Computer Systems Colloquium Seminar New Golden Age for Computer Architecture: Domain-Specific Hardware/Software Co-Design, Enhanced Security, Open Instruction Sets, and Agile Chip Development Speaker: John Hennessy, 2017 Turing Award Recipient / Chairman, Alphabet In the 1980s, Mead and Conway democratized chip design and high-level language programming surpassed assembly language programming, which made instruction set advances viable. Innovations like RISC, superscalar, multilevel caches, and speculation plus compiler advances (especially in register allocation) ushered in a Golden Age of computer architecture, when performance increased annually by 60%. In the later 1990s and 2000s, architectural innovation decreased, so performance came primarily from higher clock rates and larger caches. The ending of Dennard Scaling and Moore's Law also slowed this path; single core performance improved only 3% last year! In addition to poor performance gains of modern microprocessors, Spectre recently demonstrated timing attacks that leak information at high rates. We're on the cusp of another Golden Age that will significantly improve cost, performance, energy, and security. These architecture challenges are even harder given that we've lost the exponentially increasing resources provided by Dennard scaling and Moore's law. We've identified areas that are critical to this new age. Turing lecture presented at 2018 ACM/IEEE 45th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) and published in the Proceedings. About the Speaker: John L. Hennessy, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, served as President of Stanford University from September 2000 until August 2016. In 2017, he initiated the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, the largest fully endowed graduate-level scholarship program in the world, and he currently serves as Director of the program. Hennessy joined Stanford's faculty in 1977. In 1981, he drew together researchers to focus on a technology known as RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), which revolutionized computing by increasing performance while reducing costs. Hennessy helped transfer this technology to industry cofounding MIPS Computer Systems in 1984. He served as chair of Computer Science, dean of the School of Engineering, and university provost before being appointed as Stanford's 10th president. As president he focused on increasing financial aid and on developing new initiatives in multidisciplinary research and teaching. He was the founding board chair of Atheros Communications, one of the early developers of WiFi technology, and has served on the board of Cisco and Alphabet (Google's parent company). He is the coauthor of two internationally used textbooks in computer architecture. His honors include the 2012 Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the ACM Turing Award (jointly with David Patterson). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Royal Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society. Hennessy earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University and his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the Stony Brook University. For more information about this seminar and its speaker, you can visit https://ee380.stanford.edu/Abstracts/181010.html Support for the Stanford Colloquium on Computer Systems Seminar Series provided by the Stanford Computer Forum. Colloquium on Computer Systems Seminar Series (EE380) presents the current research in design, implementation, analysis, and use of computer systems. Topics range from integrated circuits to operating systems and programming languages. It is free and open to the public, with new lectures each week. Learn more: http://bit.ly/WinYX5

• published: 11 Oct 2018
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