[Pl-seminar] 6/24: Kathryn McKinley, The Yin and Yang of Hardware Heterogeneity: Can Software Survive?

[Vincent St-Amour]

NEU Programming Languages Seminar presents

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

Monday, 6/24
1:30-3:00
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)


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 Denard era.