Babak Falsafi Explained

Babak Falsafi (Persian: بابک فلسفی) is an Iranian-American computer scientist specializing in computer architecture and digital platform design. He is the founding director of EcoCloud at EPFL, an industrial/academic consortium investigating efficient and intelligent data-centric technologies. He is a professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. Prior to that he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science, a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering (both summa cum laude) with distinctions from SUNY Buffalo, and a master's degree and PhD in computer science from University Wisconsin - Madison.

He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a server architecture[1] which laid the foundation for Sun Microsystems' NUMA machines,[2] technologies to minimize (leakage) power in the memory system in the absence of activity (Supply Gating)[3] and in shared memory (Snoop Filtering)[4] prevalent in modern CPUs and multi-socket servers, and memory system accelerators [5] in modern (ARM) CPUs in mobile platforms. He has shown that hardware memory consistency models are neither necessary (in the 90's)[6] nor sufficient (a decade later)[7] to achieve high performance in multiprocessor systems. These results eventually led to fence speculation in modern (x86) CPUs. He argued and demonstrated that the slowdown in silicon efficiency (Dennard's Law) and density scaling (Moore's Law) would lead to Dark Silicon and specialization in servers.[8] These results led to a follow-on study on careful characterization of scale-out workloads on server platforms [9] which laid the foundation for the first generation of Cavium ARM server CPUs, ThunderX.

He is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, was named an ACM Fellow in 2015 [10] for contributions to multiprocessor and memory architecture design and evaluation and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012[11] for contributions to multiprocessor architecture and memory systems.

Notes and References

  1. Falsafi . Babak . Wood . David A. . Reactive NUMA: A design for unifying S-COMA and CC-NUMA . ACM Sigarch Computer Architecture News . 25 . 2 . 1997 . 229–240 . 10.1145/384286.264205 .
  2. Book: Hagersten . Eric . Koster . Michael . Proceedings Fifth International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture . WildFire: A scalable path for SMPS . 1999 . 172–181 . https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=822785. 9780769500041 . Hpca '99 . 10.1109/HPCA.1999.744361 . 10.1.1.21.8882 . 13915228 .
  3. Book: Powell . Michael . Yang . Se-Hyun . Falsafi . Babak . Roy . Kaushik . Vijaykumar . T. N. . Proceedings of the 2000 international symposium on Low power electronics and design - ISLPED '00 . Gated-Vdd . 2000 . 90–95 . https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=344526. 10.1145/344166.344526 . 9781581131901 . 3241652 .
  4. Book: Moshovos . Andreas . Memik . Gokhan . Falsafi . Babak . Choudhary . Alok . Proceedings HPCA Seventh International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture . JETTY: Filtering snoops for reduced energy consumption in SMP servers . 85–96 . 2001 . 10.1109/HPCA.2001.903254 . 0-7695-1019-1 . 6811066 . http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/135568/files/hpca01_jetty.pdf .
  5. Somogyi . Stephen . Wenisch . Thomas F. . Ailamaki . Anastasia . Falsafi . Babak . Moshovos . Andreas . Spatial Memory Streaming . ACM Sigarch Computer Architecture News . 34 . 2 . 2006 . 252–263 . 10.1145/1150019.1136508 . 3552110 .
  6. Gniady . Chris . Is SC + ILP = RC? . Falsafi . Babak . Vijaykumar . T. N. . ACM Sigarch Computer Architecture News . 27 . 2 . 1999 . 162–171 . 10.1145/307338.300993 . free .
  7. Book: Wenisch . Thomas F. . Ailamaki . Anastasia . Falsafi . Babak . Moshovos . Andreas . Proceedings of the 34th annual international symposium on Computer architecture . Mechanisms for store-wait-free multiprocessors . 266–277 . https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1250696. 10.1145/1250662.1250696 . 2007 . 9781595937063 . Isca '07 . 35 . 2 . 1024059 .
  8. Hardavellas . Nikos . Ferdman . Michael . Falsafi . Babak . Ailamaki . Anastasia . Toward Dark Silicon in Servers . IEEE Micro . 2011 . 31 . 4 . 6–15 . 10.1109/MM.2011.77 . 2765349 .
  9. Ferdman . Michael . Adileh . Almutaz . Kocberber . Onur . Volos . Stavros . Alisafaee . Mohammad . Jevdjic . Djordje . Kaynak . Cansu . Popescu . Adrian Daniel . Ailamaki . Anastasia . Falsafi . Babak . Clearing the clouds: A study of emerging scale-out workloads on modern hardware . ACM Sigarch Computer Architecture News . 40 . 1 . 37–48 . 10.1145/2189750.2150982 . March 2012 .
  10. Web site: Falsafi . Babak . ACM Fellows .
  11. Web site: 2012 elevated fellow. IEEE Fellows Directory.

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