The design of distributed systems is and will be altered by the computer architecture innovations enabled by Moore's Law. I will survey some of these issues and how they might affect the design of distributed systems. Topics will include ideas for merging of clusters and large shared-memory multiprocessors, the emerging InfiniBand system area network standard, the effect of simultaneous multithreading, and the potential for softening the memory wall through inter-processor speculation.
Link: PowerPoint version of Dr. Hill's presentation
Biographical Sketch
Mark D. Hill is Professor and Romnes Fellow in both the Computer Sciences Department and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned a B.S.E. from Michigan in 1981 and a Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1987, won an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award in 1989, and was named an IEEE Fellow in 2000. He is a Director of ACM SIGARCH, is co-inventor of 16 U.S. patents, has published more than 50 technical papers, and recently co-edited "Readings in Computer Architecture" for Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. His work targets the memory systems of shared-memory multiprocessors and high-performance uniprocessors. He currently co-directs the Wisconsin Multifacet project with Prof. David Wood. See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill for more information.
Last modified: July 24, 2000