Toward Programmable High-Performance Multicores

One of the biggest challenges facing us today is how to design parallel architectures that attain high performance while efficiently supporting a programmable environment. In this talk, I describe novel organizations that will make the next generation of multicores more programmable and higher performance. Specifically, I show how to automatically reuse the upcoming transactional memory hardware for optimized code generation. Next, I describe a prototype of Record&Replay hardware that brings program monitoring for debugging and security to the next level of capability. I also describe a new design of hardware fences that is overhead-free and requires no software support. Finally, if time permits, I will outline architectural support to detect sequential consistency violations transparently.

Josep Torrellas is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. He is the Director of the Center for Programmable Extreme-Scale Computing, a center funded by DARPA, DOE, and NSF that focuses on architectures for extreme energy and power efficiency. He also directs the Intel-Illinois Parallelism Center (I2PC), a center created by Intel to advance parallel computing in clients. He has made contributions to parallel computer architecture in the areas of shared-memory multiprocessor organizations, cache hierarchies and coherence protocols, thread-level speculation, and hardware and software reliability. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University.