COLLOQUIUM
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina

 
Software and Hardware Support for 
Effective Locality-Aware Computing
Xiaodong Zhang

Department of Computer Science
College of William and Mary
and
National Science Foundation 

Date: February 10, 2003 (Monday)
Time: 3:30-4:30PM
Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge)


Abstract

Execution performance of both commercial and scientific applications
is critically determined by how efficiently the memory hierarchy can
be utilized.  Although modern computer systems provide many caches at
different levels of the memory hierarchy, locality exploitation is not
guaranteed.  In this talk, I will give an overview of a large project
on software and hardware support for effective locality-aware high
performance computing.  I will present three selective research
topics: (1) cache optimization techniques at the application software
level, (2) microarchitecture design for exploiting row buffer locality
in DRAM, and (3) an efficient page replacement algorithm for buffer
cache and its system software implementation.  Through these case
studies, I will discuss merits and limits of locality-aware techniques
at different system levels


Xiaodong Zhang is the Program Director of Advanced Computational
Research at the National Science Foundation. His home institution is
the College of William and Mary where he is a Professor of Computer
Science. He has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on
Parallel and Distributed Systems, and is an associate editor of IEEE
Micro. His research interests are in the area of high performance and
distributed computing and systems, and computer architecture.