Seminars

Programming in the Brave New World of Systems-on-a-chip

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Arvind

Abstract

Systems-on-a-chip in client devices like cell phones has a lot of specialized hardware to reduce power/energy consumption. In this brave new world, the whole software stack must interface with ever changing hardware at the bottom. Such systems by definition are highly concurrent and reactive. A method of building such systems is to compose functionally specialized modules, be they are implemented in hardware or software, in a manner that the functionality and performance of the system is predictable from the parts. We will present a hardware inspired methodology for concurrent and parallel programming and show how it can be used to automatically generate hardware/software interfaces and the associated communication infrastructure.

Speaker Biography

Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. Arvind’s group, in collaboration with Motorola, built the Monsoon dataflow machines and its associated software in the late eighties. In 2000, Arvind started Sandburst which was sold to Broadcom in 2006. In 2003, Arvind co-founded Bluespec Inc., an EDA company to produce a set of tools for high-level synthesis. In 2001, Dr. R. S. Nikhil and Arvind published the book "Implicit parallel programming in pH". Arvind's current research focus is on enabling rapid development of embedded systems. Arvind is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.