A critical challenge for modern system design is accommodating the increasing demand for performance in a tight power budget. To address this challenge, it is essential to understand theoretical and practical limits of computation. In this talk, we will discuss current practices, how they evolved over the years and why energy efficiency became the utmost importance for computing systems. We will cover a subset of promising ways to improve energy efficiency, including data recomputation and exploiting approximate computing. Oftentimes, recomputing data becomes more energy efficient than storing and retrieving pre-computed data by minimizing the prevalent power and performance overhead of data storage, retrieval, and communication. The key idea behind data recomputation is to replace a load with a sequence of instructions to recompute the respective data value, only if it is more energy-efficient. On the other hand, approximate computing has emerged as a promising paradigm that consists of various techniques spanning multiple levels of the system stack which exploit algorithmic noise tolerance of emerging Recognition-Mining-Synthesis (RMS) applications to improve energy efficiency and performance. In this regard, we will discuss approximate near-threshold voltage computing to improve energy efficiency. Finally, we will touch upon emerging technologies and novel computing paradigms that will change our way of designing systems and computing which I call Renaissance of Computing.

Bio:

Ismail Akturk is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is a member of ALTAI research group, led by Prof. Karpuzcu. He holds MS in Electrical Engineering and MS in Computer Engineering degrees. He is broadly interested in computer systems, and specifically in computer architecture. His research efforts include improving energy efficiency, scalability and reliability of the systems and his work has been published in top-notch venues, such as IEEE Micro Magazine, ACM TACO, HPCA and ASPLOS. Before joining the University of Minnesota, he worked in the National Center for High Performance Computing of Turkey as data management specialist.