Future Power Efficient Hardware Accelerator Presentation

Lecturer: Dr. John Paul Strachan, Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, CA

Date: February 28th (Thursday), 10:00am

Location: Rm 1001, Engineering Science Building (ESB), University of California, Santa Barbara

The world of computing appears to be entering a highly creative phase where novel architectures, circuits, and even devices beyond CMOS can not only be explored again, but any significant future performance gains may depend on them. A Cambrian explosion in the hardware space is developing, with massive extinction events likely to follow. I will describe my team’s efforts to simultaneously co-design from algorithms and architectures down to novel devices in order to find gains in speed and power. We have developed new circuits and assembled architectures that accelerate Finite Automata, enabling rapid pattern matching used in applications from security to genomics. We have also developed architectures leveraging the analog and non-volatile nature of memristors (tunable resistance switches) assembled in crossbar arrays to accelerate machine learning, image and signal processing. Significant improvements over CPUs, GPUs, and custom digital ASICs are forecasted in both such systems. Finally, I will describe and demonstrate how harnessing noise in analog circuits can be used to build a Classical Annealer for solving optimization problems more rapidly and at lower energy than any digital system or even the Quantum Annealers under intense development.

About Dr. John Paul Strachan:

photo of John Paul Strachan

John Paul Strachan leads the Rebooting Computing team at Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The team builds novel types of hardware from emerging device technology, with expertise spanning materials, device physics, circuits, architectures, benchmarking, modeling, and experimental design. His interests include computing applications in machine learning, network security, and optimization problems. John Paul studied at MIT and Stanford University for his undergraduate and PhD, respectively, and has been a researcher at HP/HPE for the past ten years. He has over 50 patents, has authored or co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed papers, and has been the PI of several US Government funded research programs. He has previously worked on nanomagnetic devices for memory for which he was awarded the Falicov Award from the American Vacuum Society, and has developed sensing systems for precision agriculture in a company which he co-founded. He serves in many professional societies including IEEE IEDM ExComm, the Nanotechnology Council ExComm, past program chair and steering member of the International Conference on Rebooting Computing, and related communities.

Hosted by: Professor Dmitri Strukov

 

Original event page: https://www.ece.ucsb.edu/events/?i=8167