Overview

The mission of the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC) is to address the research challenges in the design (hardware and software) and utilization (programming and interfacing) of information system platforms for consumer/enterprise/defense applications, to be deployed in the late- and post-silicon era, so as to achieve orders of magnitude improvement in cost (design and related NRE, programming) and quality (lower power, higher functional performance, increased reliability, increased usability).

The research is driven from above by emerging applications, and from below by technology trends in materials, devices, fabrication and circuit fabrics, with the goal of developing cost-efficient platforms through future technology generations with significant novel functionality so as to enable whole new application classes.

Research Focus

The GSRC center has structured itself along interlocking research themes:

• Application Drivers - This theme provides input to the other five design technology themes on evolution of applications in the future - their cost-quality needs, as well as cross-layer optimization opportunities in platform design, covering applications along all segments of the platform space, including infrastructure, mobile and sensor nodes.
• Platform Architectures - This theme seeks innovative design exploration and implementation techniques that are needed for emerging power-constrained platforms that consist of highly concurrent and heterogeneous computing, communication and memory components, including RF/AMS and software.
• Programming Concurrent Systems - This theme addresses challenges in efficient and productive programming of highly concurrent platforms, but with increased consideration of heterogeneity in computation, connectivity and storage; as well as of domain-specific constraints and solutions.
• Platform Viability - This theme is focused on platform correctness pre-deployment, i.e. on detecting design and fabrication errors, through innovative and overlapping solutions in hardware/software verification, post-silicon validation and test.
• Resilient Systems - This theme focuses exclusively on post-deployment or lifetime resiliency, by dealing with increasing platform fragility through system-level solutions with a strong emphasis on near zero-cost solutions.
• Alternative Computation Models - This theme explores the development of new computation models that provide a better match for application characteristics, in specific domains, with increasingly unreliable fabrics.

Center Management

Center Director

Sharad Malik

Committees

The executive committee (consisting of the director and theme leaders) is in charge of setting and executing the technical and research directions of the center.

The coordinating committee forms the bridge between the center and the sponsoring bodies, while the executive advisory group helps to provide the center leadership with feedback and inputs on the performance of the center and the research directions.