Foundations for Heterogeneous Datacenter Design and Management

Speaker:        Dr. Benjamin C. Lee
                Electrical and Computer Engineering
                Duke University

Title:          "Foundations for Heterogeneous Datacenter Design and
                Management"

Date:           Thursday, 28 February 2013

Time:           3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:          Room 3408 (via lifts 17/18), HKUST

Abstract:

As cloud computing proliferates, demand for datacenter computing capacity
increases.  Moreover, we must increase capacity within today's
megawatt-scale power budgets. If we could achieve such datacenter
architectures, we would see qualitative advances in diverse application
domains, such as computational science, business analytics, and personal
computing. Toward this goal, we present the case for building datacenters
using processors and memories that were originally intended for mobile and
embedded platforms.

Mobile processors reduce power by simplifying the datapath and cache.  For
web search, mobile processors are 5x more efficient than server
processors. We quantify and mitigate the impact on query latency,
relevance, and quality-of-service.  Mobile memories reduce power by using
non-terminated links and lower data rates.  Such low-power memory is 5.6x
more efficient than server memories. We identify datacenter applications
that can benefit from mobile memories.  Finally, diverse applications have
heterogeneous architecture demands and we discuss how future datacenters
might navigate this complexity with statistical inference and economic
mechanisms.


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Biography:

Benjamin Lee is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at Duke University.  His research focuses on scalable
technologies, power-efficient architectures, and high-performance
applications.  He is also interested in the economics and public policy of
computation. He has held visiting research positions at Microsoft
Research, Intel Labs, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Dr. Lee received his B.S. at the University of California at Berkeley,
S.M. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, and post-doctorate at Stanford
University. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2012. And his research has
been honored as a Top Pick by IEEE Micro Magazine (2010), twice as a
Research Highlight by Communications of the ACM (2010, 2011), and by an
NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship (2009-10).