Hardware-Software Co-Design for General-Purpose Processors

  • Craig Zilles | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The shift toward multi-core processors is the most obvious implication of a greater trend toward efficient computing. In the past, hardware designers were willing to spend superlinear area and power for incremental performance improvements, but that era has come to an end.
With the low-hanging fruit of processor microarchitecture having largely been picked, it is my belief that we will increasingly see a trend toward co-designing hardware with the software that runs on it.
Processor designers will ask “what minimal features and interfaces must be place in hardware to achieve our performance goals?”

In this talk, I will discuss our recent work exploring a collection of hardware primitives for: 1) making trivial the implementation of speculative compiler optimizations (which both increase performance and reduce power consumption), 2) implementing a strongly-atomic Transactional Memory where common-case transactions execute in hardware with no overhead, but the semantics are defined by software, and 3) instrumenting code to collect profile information with negligible overhead.

Speaker Details

Craig Zilles is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research focuses on the interaction between compilers and computer architecture, especially in the context of managed and dynamic languages. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to his work on computer architecture and compilers, he developed the first algorithm that allowed rendering arbitrary three-dimensional polygonal shapes for haptic interfaces (force-feedback human-computer interfaces). His work has been selected for the 2008 IEEE Micro “Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences”, he holds 5 patents, and he was awarded the NSF CAREER award, the UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence, and the Everitt Award for Teaching Excellence.

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