Kick-off and Industrial Engagement Event

The event brought together students, supervisors and industry partners of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism, to celebrate the Centre's launch.

Students managed to meet our industry partners, hear about their current work and find out about internships and other opportunities the companies provide.

Industry partners had the opportunity to present short talks about their companies, speak with students and supervisors at the poster and information session and find out more details about the CDT training and engagement opportunities at the Industrial Advisory Board meeting.

Keynote Speaker: Babak Falsafi, Director, EcoCloud, Professor of CS, EPFL

Title: “Big Data and Dark Silicon: Taming Two IT Inflection Points on a Collision Course”

Abstract:

Information technology is now an indispensable pillar of a modern-day society, thanks to the proliferation of digital platforms in the past several decades. We are now witnessing two inflection points, however, that are about to change IT as we know it. First, we are entering the Big Data era where demand on robust and economical data processing, communication and storage is growing faster than technology can sustain. Second, while forecasts indicate that chip density scaling will continue for another decade, the diminishing returns in digital platform energy efficiency and the impending “energy wall”, is leading server designers towards energy-centric solutions and eventually Dark Silicon. In this talk, I will motivate these two IT trends and present promising research avenues for IT platform and infrastructure designers and operators to help mitigate these technological challenges.

Biography:

Babak Falsafi is Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the founding director of the EcoCloud research center pioneering future energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly cloud technologies at EPFL. He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a scalable multiprocessor architecture which was prototyped by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), snoop filters and temporal stream prefetchers that are incorporated into IBM BlueGene/P and BlueGene/Q, and computer system design evaluation methodologies that have been in use by AMD and HP for research and product development. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a fellow of IEEE.

Agenda