Title:
Application-Specific Processors for Client-side Computing: Opportunities and Pitfalls

Abstract:
Client-side computing is again exerting its forces on the computing industry. Video gaming, diverse media, high-definition video content have created a deep consumer demand for higher performance, and have brought supercomputing to the masses. Game consoles and graphics chips today have performance levels that are near to breaking the TFLOPs barrier, with chip architectures that boldly embrace parallelism. High-performance, parallel computing has entered our living room.

In this talk I will provide some observed trends, insights, and opinions about client-side opportunities for application-specific acceleration. Part of this talk will cover the opportunities and challenges faced by AGEIA Technologies, which created an application- specific processor for physics acceleration for the video gaming market. Part of the talk will cover Rigel, a new project underway at UIUC involving a massively parallel, fine-grained accelerator and its implications on application-specific acceleration.

Bio:
Sanjay J. Patel is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently leading the applications thrust of the Intel/Microsoft-sponsored Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at UIUC.
His research interests include high-performance and parallel chip architectures, parallel programming models, and VLSI.
He has previously worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel Corporation, HAL Computer Systems, and consulted for Transmeta, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. From 2005-2008, he was the CTO and Chief Architect of AGEIA Technologies, a fabless semiconductor industry that developed chips for accelerating physical simulation for video games.
Patel earned his Bachelor (1990), Master of Science (1992) and Ph.D. (1999) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.