Design, Test and Application of Emerging Computer Architectures

Overview

The term Emerging Computer Architectures summarizes a new class of innovative computer architectures, which aim to improve computational performance, power efficiency and reliability based on radical new design principles.

One of these new design principles is approximate computing, which includes temporal-approximate and Boolean-approximate computer architectures. The first category can be seen as a generalization of existing speculative computer architectures. The second category allows inexact functionality within certain boundaries and can be applied in multimedia or telecommunication applications. Examples for such emerging computer architectures are highly power-efficient CPUs that operate near to the threshold voltage.

Another group of emerging architectures are variable precision computer architectures, which enable a significant reduction of power consumption, bandwidth and storage requirements.

This seminar addresses three main areas of challenges that arise with the advent of emerging computer architectures, namely the design, the test and the scope of applications. This comprises the topics:

• Design and synthesis of ECAs

• Test methods and test infrastructure

• Applications of ECAs in the embedded domain

• Applications of ECAs in the high-performance computing (HPC) domain

The first meeting takes place on Thursday, April 16th, 2015 from 14:00-15:30 o'clock in room 0.457 (comp. science building 38).