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Presentation: Approaches to System Design for the Working Engineer.

Abstract: While Moore’s Law is alive and well, system design has changed as engineers have to adjust to the new economic realities of sky rocketing NRE costs, ever increasing verification times, and the need of reusing IP building blocks. This tutorial provides an insight into the system design alternatives available today, spanning from ASICs, ASSPs, FPGAs to CPUs and GPUs. TI will share insights into the state of the art of IP based ASSP design. Xilinx will review the emergence of the FPGA as a viable design platform. Mercury Computers will share the perspective of a system house that exploits a mix of ASSPs, FPGA, CPUs, and GPUs to build computing solutions. The presenters will provide the necessary facts and numbers to help real world engineers decide which silicon strategy will work best for them.

Part I: ASICs To ASSPs For Working Engineers (Building the OMAP 3430)
Author: David Witt, Texas Instruments

Part II: 20 Years Of FPGA Evolution: From Glue Logic To Systems Components
Author: Peter Alfke, Xilinx

Part III: Exploiting Processor Heterogeneity Through Reconfigurable Interactions
Author: Shepard Siegel, Mercury Computer Systems

2:00 - 5:30pm

Afternoon Tutorial
Chair: Norm Jouppi, Hewlett Packard

Presentation: Enterprise Power and Cooling: A Chip-to-Data Center Perspective.

Part I: Background
Part II: Cooling: A Chip-Core to Cooling-Tower Perspective
Part III: Power: From Chips to Data Centers
Part IV: Case Study and Future Directions
Author(s): Chandrakant Patel and Parthasarathy Ranganathan, HP Labs

Abstract:

Power and cooling are increasingly becoming key challenges in enterprise environments, impacting infrastructure, electricity, and maintenance costs, as well as compaction, reliability, and environmental standards’ compliance. In the future, it is going to be important to address these challenges “holistically” – across the different levels of the hardware and software stacks while considering the total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, power and cooling need to be considered together along with performance and reliability, as decisions made for one influence the choices and costs for the other. Similarly, there is a need for cross-cutting solutions going beyond better adaptivity in the system elements to include the operating system and the management and applications software stack. Co-ordination is also needed across the entire “ensemble” – from chips to data centers. All this will require interdisciplinary research spanning electrical engineering, computer science, and thermal science. In aid of this, our tutorial seeks to provide a broad overview of the power and cooling problem in enterprises. We present recent industry trends to motivate the problem and then discuss current cooling and power work in the context of a unified framework from chip-core to data center. We conclude with a discussion of holistic optimizations for the problem including a detailed case study of the HP Labs Smart Data Center.