Department of Systems Architecture

NEC Laboratories America, Inc., Princeton Campus

Emerging applications in networking, digital media and information technology are expected to drive the evolution of future computing platforms. Systems Architecture refers to the combination of the underlying hardware architecture and system software that comprise a computing platform. Today, we have a wide range of hardware options from general-purpose, parallel multicore CPUs to custom (massively parallel) ASICs and tightly integrated multi-processing systems-on-chip (SoC2). Fortunately, the myriad hardware options do share a common theme: future performance improvements are expected to come primarily from more parallelism in hardware rather than increasing clock-speeds. Why is Systems Architecture important? Applications are processing increasingly large amounts of data, which slows down performance. To address this, we can devise new algorithms. However, algorithmic improvements alone are not sufficient to keep up with the demands in securing, analyzing or searching large volumes of data. Also, world-wide adoption of common standards makes it difficult to immediately leverage incremental advances in the underlying algorithms. Therefore, we must look beyond algorithmic improvements. Innovations in systems architecture can provide a big boost in application performance. Advances in multi-CPU architectures and FPGA technology are creating compelling cost-performance hardware computing platform tradeoffs. Advances in operating systems, run-time support and parallel domain-specific middleware open up new opportunities for improving application performance.

Research Areas:
Parallel Computing
Dependable Computing