Babak Falsafi
Professor
PhD (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998)
babak.falsafi@epfl.ch +41 21 69 35592 http://parsa.epfl.ch/~falsafi
Biography
Babak is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the founding director of the EcoCloud research center pioneering future energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly cloud technologies at EPFL. He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a scalable multiprocessor architecture which was prototyped by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), snoop filters and temporal stream prefetchers that are incorporated into IBM BlueGene/P and BlueGene/Q, and computer system simulation sampling methodologies that have been in use by AMD and HP for research and product development. His most notable contribution has been to be first to show that contrary to conventional wisdom, multiprocessor memory programming models -- known as memory consistency models -- prevalent in all modern systems are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve high performance. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM.
NEWS
CloudSuite 3.0 is now released (with tutorials at EuroSys and HiPEAC in 2016). CloudSuite 3.0 is Docker-ready and integrated into Google PerfKit.
Cavium ThunderX, a recent ARM-based server processor, is the first scale-out processor which is workload-optimized based on our work in "Clearing the Clouds" and the first version of CloudSuite. See this article in EETimes from EEMBC and Cavium.
The EuroCloud Server project has been hailed as a "flagship" project to drive innovation in datacenter design by EU. See the ACM Tech report snippet.
RESEARCH
Babak's research and educational activities primarily center around architectural innovation to address four emerging challenges in the design and performance-scalability of future computer systems: (1) the programming wall, due to the emergence of multiprocessor chips as the hardware pillars for future IT infrastructure and the lack of commodity parallel software, (2) the memory wall, due to the ever-growing gap between processor and memory performance, (3) the technology wall, due to the exponential increase in system power consumption and the dramatic reduction in circuit reliability and testability in emerging CMOS fabrication processes, and (4) the simulation wall, due to the increase in hardware and software complexity necessitating detailed modeling and representative measurement. He investigates techniques to address these challenges in the context of the following projects:
- CloudSuite: A Benchmark Suite for Scale-Out Workloads
- SimFlex/ProtoFlex: Fast, Full-System Scalable Multiprocessor Simulation/Emulation
- Scale-Out NUMA: Rack-Scale Computer Architecture
- VISA: Server Processors for the Dark Silicon Era
Selected Talks
Public Clouds will Subsume (Most of) HPC
HPC Summit,
May 2017, PDF.
Memory-Centric Server Architecture
Talks at Columbia, Edinburgh and HKUST,
2016, PDF.
Big Data & Dark Silicon: Taming Two IT Trends on a Collision Course
HiPEAC CSW & IEEE CloudNet Keynotes,
October 2014, PDF.
Reliability in the Dark Silicon Era
IOLTS 2011 Keynote,
July 2011, PDF.
Dark Silicon & Its Implications on Server Chip Design
Microsoft Research,
November 2010, PDF, Video.
TRUSS: Reliable, Scalable Server Architecture
Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing Colloquia,
April 2006, PDF.
Temporal Memory Streaming
University of Texas, Computer Science Department Colloquia,
December 2005, PDF.
Transactional Execution: Wait-Free Hardware Memory Ordering
Dagstuhl Seminar on "Hardware and Software Consistency
Models: Programmability and Performance",
October 2003, PDF.
Fields of expertise
Computer architecture, technology-scalable datacenters, design for dark silicon, robust computer systems and performance evaluation.
Publications
Infoscience
Teaching & PhD
Teaching
- Computer Science,
- Mathematics
Communication Systems
PhD Programs
- Doctoral program in computer and communication sciences
PhD Students
Gupta Siddharth
Kassir Hussein
Lin Tao
Pourhabibi Zarandi Arash
Sutherland Mark Johnathon
Thambiah Kathirgamaraja Pradeep
Tian Zilu
Past PhD Students
Daglis Alexandros ...Fytraki Sotiria ...
Jevdic Dorde ...
Kaynak Ilknur Cansu ...
Koçberber Yusuf Onur ...
Lotfi Kamran Pejman ...
Novakovic Dejan ...
Novakovic Stanko ...
Picorel Obando Javier ...
Volos Stavros ...
Courses
Introduction to multiprocessor architecture
Multiprocessors are a core component in all types of computing infrastructure, from phones to datacenters. This course will build on the prerequisites of processor design and concurrency to introduce the essential technologies required to combine multiple...
Topics in Machine Learning Systems
This course will cover the latest technologies, platforms and research contributions in the area of machine learning systems. The students will read, review and present papers from recent venues across the systems for ua ML spectrum.
Topics on Datacenter Design
Modern datacenters with thousands of servers and multi-megawatt power budgets form the backbone of our digital universe. In this course, we will survey a broad and comprehensive spectrum of datacenter design topics from workloads, to server architecture a...