About System Design Research at GSRC

Overview

Sharad Malik, Center Director

The overall 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.

The center research seeks integrated solutions for:

• Managing cost challenges emerging from increased design and validation/verification complexity.
• Design and programming of highly concurrent, heterogeneous platforms while meeting tight power budgets.
• Design for resiliency under diverse threats, including potentially high-failure rate post-silicon fabrics.

Research Focus

To address these trends, the center has structured itself along the following interlocking research themes:

• Application Drivers
• Platform Architectures
• Programming Concurrent Systems
• Platform Viability
• Resilient Systems
• Alternative Computation Models