[Colloq] Colloquium Talk: Kathryn McKinley - The Yin and Yang of Hardware Heterogeneity: Can Software Survive? - June 24th, 1:30pm, 366 WVH

[Jessica Biron]

Kathryn S McKinley - Microsoft Research 
(on leave from University of Texas, Austin) 

June 24th, 1:30pm 
366WVH 

The Yin and Yang of Hardware Heterogeneity: Can Software Survive? 

Power and energy constraints are now the driving force in all devices from servers to smartphones. This talk starts with quantitative power, performance, and energy measurements on a range of workloads and devices that point to the need for hardware heterogeneity to match software characteristics. However, programming heterogeneous hardware directly is a nightmare. We show how to abstract, choose, and exploit hardware heterogeneity in specific contexts. For interactive server workloads, 
we promote jobs from slow to fast cores to deliver substantial improvements in throughput and energy compared to homogeneous designs. These results offer some hope that software may survive and perhaps thrive as heterogeneity hardware evolves in the post Dennard era.