NoC's at the center of chip architecture: Urgent needs (today) and what they must become (future)

The collision of large-scale computational capabilities (multi-core) and system-scale integration (system-on-chip) have produced a landscape in which networks-on-chip are a central critical element of system design. However, the traditional approaches and requirements from these two communities are quite different with divergence in requirements of cost, regularity, power, methodology, compatibility, features, etc. This talk will survey the landscape of modern NoC design, and point out challenging new opportunities and directions for the NoC research community. Open challenges include how to reconcile performance with cost, what functions are within scope for NoC, how to reconcile performance with heterogeneity, how to reconcile performance with long-term compatibility, and so on. The central architectural importance of Networks-on-Chip are now clear, the challenges are to define the architectural approaches and paths which enable robust, efficient, high-performance, cost-effective, and of course rapidly designed systems. Bio: Andrew Chien is vice president of the Corporate Technology Group and director of Research for Intel Corporation. Chien previously served as the Science Applications International Corporation Endowed Chair Professor in the department of computer science and engineering, and the founding director of the Center for Networked Systems at the University of California at San Diego. CNS is a university-industry alliance focused on developing technologies for robust, secure, and open networked systems. For more than 20 years, Chien has been a global leader in research and development of highperformance computing systems. His expertise includes networking, Grids, high performance clusters, distributed systems, computer architecture, high speed routing networks, compilers, and object oriented programming languages. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and has published over 130 technical papers. Chien serves on the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA), Advisory Board of the National Science Foundation's Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, and Editorial Board of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM). From 1990 to 1998, Chien was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During that time, he held joint appointments with both the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), working on large-scale clusters. In 1999 he co-founded Entropia, Inc., an enterprise desktop Grid company. Chien received his bachelor's in electrical engineering, master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.