Computer Architecture

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What's new?

The IBM paper "Active Management of Timing Guardband to Save Energy in POWER7" won the Best Paper award in the 2011 MICRO-44 conference.
Architecture Highlights 2010: IBM Architecture PIC Student Workshop, October 7-8, 2010.

Upcoming seminar

June 6, 2013
Virtualization and Data Center Energy Management, Canturk Isci, IBM Research.
Seminar in YKT 20-001 at 10:00 AM EST.
June 17, 2013
Title to be announced, Balaji Veeraraghavan, IBM Software Group (Netezza).
Seminar in YKT 20-001 at 11:00 AM EST.

Recent Seminars

May 10, 2013
"Disciplined Approximate Computing: From Language to Hardware," by Prof. Luis Ceze, University of Washington
Seminar in 20-043 at 9:30AM EST.
April 18, 2013
"Efficient and Easily Programmable Accelerator Architectures," by Prof. Tor Aamodt, University of British Columbia
Seminar in 20-001 at 10:30AM EST.

A complete list of recent seminars can be found here.

Project Name

Computer Architecture

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At its core, IBM is a computer company; and IBM researchers have made seminal contributions to the computer architecture field. Here are some of our exciting research activities in the computer architecture area.

IBM Computer Architecture Projects

Current Projects- selected tab,
Completed Projects

Blue Gene
A supercomputer project aiming to tackle the protein folding grand challenge with petaflop performance that produced the world's fastest supercomputer.
Compiler Technology for Scalable Architectures
"Single source" compiler solutions targeting heterogeneous parallelism (MIMD/SIMD, shared/distributed memory, heterogeneous cores) in Scale-Up and Scale-Out architectures.
Mambo
A software simulation environment used for modeling many past and future IBM POWER designs including Cell, BlueGene, and POWER7.
Power-aware design
Research on power and complexity-aware microprocessor design, analysis and validation.
Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System (PERCS)
DARPA-funded project for ground-breaking research in revolutionary chip technology, new computer architecture, operating systems, compilers and programming environments.
Reliability-Aware Microarchitectures
This project is focused on microarchitectural support to ensure reliable operation, in the face of hard and soft hardware failures.
Systems Technology and Microarchitecture
This project focuses on exploration of the fundamental design principles that govern the performance of computer systems using both analytical tools, and detailed simulations. Innovations from this research are applied to the design of the system Z processor, and the memory subsystem.
Thermal Management System Research
This project targets architecture-related thermal issues including on-chip sensor, packaging, variation and yield strategies, thermal-aware multicore data center system and software research, and other thermal-related reliability and energy research.
Liquid Metal
The goal of this project is to create a single unified programming language and environment that allows (all) portions of a system to move fluidly between hardware and software, dynamically and adaptively.

Recent Publications

"Cache Restoration for Highly Partitioned Virtualized Systems," David M. Daly, Harold W. Cain, Proceedings of the 18th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2012.
"Exploring the architecture of a stream register-based snoop filter," M Blumrich, V Salapura, A Gara, Transactions on high-performance embedded architectures and compilers III, Springer, 2011.
"The IBM Blue Gene/Q interconnection network and message unit," D Chen, N A Eisley, P Heidelberger, R M Senger, Y Sugawara, S Kumar, V Salapura, D L Satterfield, B Steinmacher-Burow, J J Parker, Proceedings of 2011 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.
"SoftBeam: Precise Tracking of Transient Faults and Vulnerability Analysis at Processor Design Time," M Gschwind, V Salapura, C Trammell, S A McKee, ICCD 2011 - International Conference on Computer Design, IEEE.
"A Hybrid Approach for Large Cache Performance Studies," D Daly, P Dube, K El Maghraoui, D Poff, L Zhang, 8th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST) 2011 .
"A Tool for Scalable Profiling and Tracing of Java and Native Code Interactions," Parijat Dube, Seetharami Seelam, Yanbin Liu, Megumi Ito, Michel Hack, Liana Fong, Graeme Johnson, Michael Dawson, Li Zhang and Yuqing Gao, QEST , 2011.
"Error Tolerance in Server Class Processors," J A Rivers, M S Gupta, J Shin, P N Kudva, P Bose, Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on, IEEE, 2011.

See our publication page for more.

Recently issued patents

Computer Program Functional Partitioning System for Heterogeneous Multi-Processing Systems, 10/11/2011, Patent 8037463, John O'Brien, Kathryn O'Brien
Computer Program Code Size Partitioning System and Method for Multiple Memory Multi-Processing Systems, 10/4/2011, Patent 8032873, 8037463, John O'Brien, Kathryn O'Brien
Cell generating Optimized SIMD Code in the Presence of Data Dependencies, 10/11/2011, Patent 8037464, Peng Zhao, Kai-Ting Wang, Alexandre Eichenberger, Peng Wu
Method and Apparatus for Conserving Power by Throttling Instruction Fetching When a Processor Encounters Low Confidence Brancges in an Information Handling System, 10/12/2011, Patent ZL200880011619.5, Chen-Yong Cher, Pradip Bose, Raymond C Yeung, Alper Buyuktosunoglu, Wolfram Sauer, Robert Philhower, Ravi Nair, Michael Gschwind

A list of all US patents issued since 2010 in the related areas can be found here.

Recent Faculty Awards and PhD Fellowships

Here are some recent IBM university relationship awards given to the faculty and students in the Computer Architecture area. Some of our past university collaborators can be found here.

Faculty Awards

Professor Hsien-Hsin Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology, "Architectural Exploration for Emerging Memory Technologies" (IBM contacts: Viji Srinivasan and Jude Rivers).
Professor Arvind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Cycle-accurate modelling of PowerPC architectures using FPGAs," (IBM contact: K. Ekanadham)
Professor Srini Devadas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Cycle-accurate modelling of PowerPC architectures using FPGAs," (IBM contact: K. Ekanadham)

PhD Fellowships

Ioana Burcea (advisor: Prof. Andreas Moshovos), University of Toronto
Jason Zebchuk (advisor: Prof. Andreas Moshovos), University of Toronto