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UT ECE professor Vijay Janapa Reddi has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant entitled Feedback-Driven Resiliency for Near-Threshold Systems.

UT ECE professor Vijay Janapa Reddi has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant entitled Feedback-Driven Resiliency for Near-Threshold Systems.

From mobile computing to Exascale systems, energy-efficiency as emerged as a first-order design challenge in Computer Architecture. In the context of processor design, near-threshold voltage (NTV) operation has been touted as a promising strategy to improve the energy-efficiency of systems by reducing the operating voltage while exploiting parallelism to compensate for the loss in frequency. NTV processors combined with Turbo mode can also offer peak performance, thereby making them suitable for a range of dynamic workload behaviors. Despite the promise of NTV-based energy-efficient systems, applications of these systems have remained largely elusive due to many issues. This research, involving VLSI circuits, computer architecture, and software systems, for the first time, addresses the reliability challenges of NTV/Turbo mode systems in the context of device aging and variability. Dr. Janapa Reddi will integrate distributed system monitors and employ hardware and software controls to enable power-efficient fault resiliency for on-chip NTV/Turbo-mode cores. The work will lay the foundations for a feedback-directed optimization system that tunes the hardware's execution to meet various applications’ requirements without compromising performance or reliability, while achieving significant improvements in energy-efficiency.