Director: Josep Torrellas
Assistant Director: Minlan Yu

The goal of the ACE center is to devise novel technologies for scalable computing that will improve the performance and the energy efficiency of diverse applications by 100x over the expected computer systems of 2030. To put the computing ecosystem on this dramatically-steeper curve of efficiency improvement, ACE innovates in processing, storage, communication, and security/correctness technologies that address the seismic shifts in the Decadal Plan for Semiconductors.

To attain our goal in the highly dynamic environment we expect in 2030, we argue for an Evolvable Computing framework. The idea is that our new accelerator hardware, memory structures, communication stacks, and security mechanisms need to be designed for extensibility and composability. Specifically, components such as hardware accelerators should have standard and composable interfaces, so they can be easily assembled into systems of different form factors, survive upgrades of their external environments, and be easily replaced by (and co-exist with) a next-generation design. Further, applications should be built as collections of functions that abstract the details of the accelerator they run on and the communication mechanisms they use. With this approach, we will also attain 30× faster time to deployment, while enabling the targeted gains in energy efficiency and performance.

The five ACE Center Themes are:

• Theme 1: Heterogeneous Computing Platforms
• Theme 2: Distributed Evolvable Memory and Storage
• Theme 3: Fine-grained Communication and Coordination
• Theme 4: Security, Privacy, and Correctness
• Theme 5: Demonstrators