Publications by Year: 2017

2017
Y. Zhu, et al., “Cognitive Computing Safety: The New Horizon for Reliability/The Design and Evolution of Deep Learning Workloads,” IEEE Micro, no. 1, pp. 15–21, 2017. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Recent advances in cognitive computing have brought widespread excitement for various machine learning–based intelligent services, ranging from autonomous vehicles to smart traffic-light systems. To push such cognitive services closer to reality, recent research has focused extensively on improving the performance, energy efficiency, privacy, and security of cognitive computing platforms.

Among all the issues, a rapidly rising and critical challenge to address is the practice of safe cognitive computing— that is, how to architect machine learning–based systems to be robust against uncertainty and failure to guarantee that they perform as intended without causing harmful behavior. Addressing the safety issue will involve close collaboration among different computing communities, and we believe computer architects must play a key role. In this position paper, we first discuss the meaning of safety and the severe implications of the safety issue in cognitive computing. We then provide a framework to reason about safety, and we outline several opportunities for the architecture community to help make cognitive computing safer.

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V. J. Reddi, “A Decade of Mobile Computing,” SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today Blog. 2017. SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today.
H. Genc, Y. Zu, T. - W. Chin, M. Halpern, and V. J. Reddi, “Flying IoT: Toward Low-Power Vision in the Sky,” IEEE Micro, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 40–51, 2017. Publisher's Version Paper
A. Zou, et al., “Ivory: Early-Stage Design Space Exploration Tool for Integrated Voltage Regulators,” in Proceedings of the 54th Annual Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2017, pp. 1. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Despite being employed in burgeoning eforts to improve power delivery eiciency, integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) have yet to be evaluated in a rigorous, systematic, or quantitative manner. To fulill this need, we present Ivory, a high-level design space exploration tool capable of providing accurate conversion eiciency, static performance characteristics, and dynamic transient responses of an IVR-enabled power delivery subsystem (PDS), enabling rapid trade-of exploration at early design stage, approximately 1000x faster than SPICE simulation. We demonstrate and validate Ivory with a wide spectrum of IVR topologies. In addition, we present a case study using Ivory to reveal the optimal PDS conigurations, with underlying power break-downs and area overheads for the GPU manycore architecture, which has yet to embrace IVRs.

 

Paper
Y. Zhu and V. J. Reddi, “Optimizing General-Purpose Cpus for Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Computing,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 1, 2017. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Mobile applications are increasingly being built using web technologies as a common substrate to achieve portability and to improve developer productivity. Unfortunately, web applications often incur large performance overhead, directly affecting the user quality-of-service (QoS) experience. Traditional techniques in improving mobile processor performance have mostly been adopting desktop-like design techniques such as increasing single-core microarchitecture complexity and aggressively integrating more cores. However, such a desktop-oriented strategy is likely coming to an end due to the stringent energy and thermal constraints that mobile devices impose. Therefore, we must pivot away from traditional mobile processor design techniques in order to provide sustainable performance improvement while maintaining energy efficiency. In this article, we propose to combine hardware customization and specialization techniques to improve the performance and energy efficiency of mobile web applications. We first perform design-space exploration (DSE) and identify opportunities in customizing existing general-purpose mobile processors, that is, tuning microarchitecture parameters. The thorough DSE also lets us discover sources of energy inefficiency in customized general-purpose architectures. To mitigate these inefficiencies, we propose, synthesize, and evaluate two new domain-specific specializations, called the Style Resolution Unit and the Browser Engine Cache. Our optimizations boost performance and energy efficiency at the same time while maintaining generalpurpose programmability. As emerging mobile workloads increasingly rely more on web technologies, the type of optimizations we propose will become important in the future and are likely to have a long-lasting and widespread impact.

 

Paper
V. J. Reddi and Y. Zhu, “Research for Practice: Web Security and Mobile Web Computing,” Communications of the ACM (CACM), 2017.Abstract

OUR THIRD INSTALLMENT of Research for Practice brings readings spanning programming languages, compilers, privacy, and the mobile Web. First, Jean Yang provides an overview of how to use information flow techniques to build programs that are secure by construction. As Yang writes, information flow is a conceptually simple “clean idea”: the flow of sensitive information across program variables and control statements can be tracked to determine whether information may in fact leak. Making information flow practical is a major challenge, however. Instead of relying on programmers to track information flow, how can compilers and language runtimes be made to do the heavy lifting? How can application writers easily express their privacy policies and understand the implications of a given policy for the set of values that an application user may see? Yang’s set of papers directly addresses these questions via a clever mix of techniques from compilers, systems, and language design. This focus on theory made practical is an excellent topic for RfP

 

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J. Mohan, D. Purohith, M. Halpern, V. Chidambaram, and V. J. Reddi, “Storage on Your Smartphone Uses More Energy Than You Think,” USENIX HotStorage. 2017.Abstract

Energy consumption is a key concern for mobile devices. Prior research has focused on the screen and the network as the major sources of energy consumption. Through carefully designed measurement-based experiments, we show that for certain storage-intensive workloads, the storage subsystem on an Android smartphone consumes a significant amount of energy (36%), on par with screen energy consumption. We analyze the energy consumption of different storage primitives, such as sequential and random writes, on two popular mobile file systems, ext4 and F2FS. In addition, since most Android applications use SQLite for storage, we analyze the energy consumption of different SQLite operations. We present several interesting results from our analysis: for example, random writes consume 15× higher energy than sequential writes, and that F2FS consumes half the energy as ext4 for most workloads. We believe our results contribute useful design guidelines for the developers of energy-efficient mobile file systems.

 

Paper Presentation
Y. Zu, W. Huang, I. Paul, and V. J. Reddi, “Ti-States: Power Management in Active Timing Margin Processors,” IEEE Micro, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 106–114, 2017. Publisher's VersionAbstract

TEMPERATURE INVERSION IS A TRANSISTOR-LEVEL EFFECT THAT IMPROVES PERFORMANCE WHEN TEMPERATURE INCREASES. THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS A COMPREHENSIVE MEASUREMENT-BASED ANALYSIS OF ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR ARCHITECTURE DESIGN AND POWER MANAGEMENT USING THE AMD A10-8700P PROCESSOR. THE AUTHORS PROPOSE TEMPERATURE-INVERSION STATES (TI -STATES) TO HARNESS THE OPPORTUNITIES PROMISED BY TEMPERATURE INVERSION. THEY EXPECT TI -STATES TO BE ABLE TO IMPROVE THE POWER EFFICIENCY OF MANY PROCESSORS MANUFACTURED IN FUTURE CMOS TECHNOLOGIES.

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