Boris Grot
Post-doctoral researcher at EPFL
Ph.D: The University of Texas at Austin, 2011
Research Domain: Computer architecture
Research Interests:
- System architectures for datacenters
- Systems with quality-of-service guarantees
- Memory systems and interconnection networks
About Me:
I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Parallel Systems Architecture
Lab (PARSA) at EPFL. My work focuses
on improving the efficiency of large-scale datacenters (think Google or
Facebook) through improvements to server processor architectures, memory
systems, and interconnects. To understand why this is an important
research direction, read below.
Prior to joining PARSA, I was a doctoral student in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. My thesis, supervised by Prof. Steve Keckler, addressed challenges of scalability and quality-of-service in on-chip networks of highly-integrated processor chips.
I am on the job market, seeking academic or research-focused industry positions. My application packet is accessible online.
Why datacenters (and my research) matter?
As mobile computing and cyber-physical systems displace traditional forms of
computing, datacenters will shoulder the data-crunching burden. There are three
reasons for the growing reliance on datacenters. First, mobile and embedded
systems are inherently constrained in their processing capabilities due to
limitations of battery technology, low thermal ceilings, and form factor
considerations. Second, the important applications of today (e.g., search,
social networking, business analytics) draw on enormous volumes of data and have
massive processing requirements that are well beyond the reach of individual
servers. Last, businesses of all sizes are increasingly moving their
applications to the cloud for reasons of scalability, resiliency, and
operational efficiency.
A modern datacenter is a football-field sized installation that houses tens of thousands of servers, draws 5-20 MW of power, and costs over $100 million to deploy. A 2010 study estimated the global datacenter energy footprint at 1.3% of the world-wide usage. This number is widely expected to grow considerably in the coming decade due to the rapid pace of deployment of new datacenters and the developing world coming online.
Energy scalability of datacenters is an important problem with major economic and environmental implications. As the semiconductor industry inches toward the physical limits of voltage scaling, improvements in energy-efficiency of future chips will require much more effort than in the past. The same is true for conventional memories and networking technologies used in datacenters. The time is right to re-invent server architectures by specializing processor chips, memory hierarchy, and networks for tomorrow’s datacenter computing.