CECS paper shapes the field of computer performance
by Heather McEwen
Earlier this year, Professor Steve Blackburn and PhD students Ting Cao and Xi Yang, co-authors on a paper, “Looking Back on the Language and Hardware Revolutions: Measured Power, Performance, and Scaling" were advised that the paper had been selected for publication by the Communications of the ACM (CACM) Research Highlights. The paper was also selected for IEEE Micro’s TopPicks 2011, which selects the 12 best papers in computer architecture for 2011.
This paper was published recently in IEEE Micro and in Communications of the ACM with a foreword by Professor David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and known as a pioneer in American computing.
Professor Patterson praises the paper, not only for turning the notion of using flawed and dated methods of computer performance claims on their collective heads, but also for the “treasure chest of data” that the paper has painstakingly recorded in the ACM Digital Library to help other computer scientists to test computer performance questions on real hardware.
According to Professor Patterson, this opportunity is a refreshing change from research results based on simulation, which has dominated the literature in the past decade.
“The paper is intensely experimental, and the experiments were carried out here at the Research School of Computer Science under Ting Cao’s supervision,” said Professor Blackburn.
“The work would not have been possible without technical staff member, Bob Edwards, fabricating the Hall effect sensor with which we could do these landmark measurements,” he said.
“I am particularly proud of our team, Ting Cao, Bob Edwards and Yang Xi, in making this research and this paper possible,” he said.
