[PRL] Fwd: Special EE Seminar - 9/15/06 -2:00PM (Ivan E. Sutherland)

[Mitchell Wand]

A chance to see a Really Famous Guy.  Come early, the hall will
probably be packed.

--Mitch

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carol Harlow <harlow at deas.harvard.edu>
Date: Sep 12, 2006 1:41 PM
Subject: Special EE Seminar - 9/15/06 -2:00PM (Ivan E. Sutherland)
To: colloquium at deas.harvard.edu



 Special EE Seminar:
 FLEET - A One-Instruction Computer

 Ivan E. Sutherland
 Sun Microsystems Fellow

 Friday (9/15/06), 2-3PM
 60 Oxford St, RM330
 Harvard University

 Abstract:
 Because modern integrated circuit technology reduces the cost of
logic to near zero, communication remains the most expensive part of
computing. Communication within and between integrated circuit chips
consumes most of the power, area, time, and design effort in a modern
machine.  Why then is communication so well hidden from today's
programmer?  An ADD instruction, for example, hides three data moves,
two from the register file to the adder and one from the adder to the
register file.

 Dr. Sutherland will discuss a proposed computer design that puts the
programmer, or at least the back end of the compiler, firmly in
control of communication.  FLEET has only one instruction: MOVE.
Where data go determines what happens to them.

 The switching network proposed for FLEET is highly concurrent, and
FLEET is correspondingly concurrent at a very low level.  MOVE
instructions can execute concurrently, making parts of the machine
inherently non-deterministic.  Instead of trying to program
concurrency into an inherently sequential system, FLEET offers a
chance to program an inherently concurrent system.  To make events
happen in a particular sequence, the program must establish a causal
relationship between them.  A special data type, the data-less
"token," Offers a simple way to distribute completion signals using
the same MOVE instructions that apply to data.

 More information about FLEET is available at:
 http://research.cs.berkeley.edu/class/fleet

 Speaker bio:
 Ivan Sutherland was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering
at Harvard from 1966 to 1968. At Harvard he devised a "head mounted
display" the first system of a type that later became known as
"virtual reality."  In 1968 he co-founded the Evans and Sutherland
Computer Corporation in Salt Lake City where he was VP of Engineering
until 1974.  After four years as founding head of Computer Science at
Caltech and the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science he became
a consultant through his firm:
 Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was later purchased by Sun
Microsystems.  He is now a Vice President and Fellow at Sun and
pursues a research program in computer architecture.  Sutherland is a
member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National
Academy of Sciences and recipient of the Turing Award of the ACM and
the John Von Neumann Medal of the IEEE.  He holds over 50 patents and
has numerous publications.  Google "Technology and Courage" to find a
non-technical paper you might find interesting.

 Dr. Sutherland is presently on loan to the University of California
at Berkeley where he is working with graduate students on the FLEET
computer design.

 Host: Gu-Yeon Wei


 --
Carol Harlow
Harvard University
Maxwell Dworkin 343
33 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617) 496-1440
Fax (617) 496-6404