A paper submitted by CS Professor Dirk Grunwald and two of his former Ph.D. students, Srilatha “Bobbie” Manne from the ECEE department and Artur Klauser from Computer Science, has won the ACM SIGARCH/IEEE-CS TCCA Influential Paper Award for 2013.
This paper, titled “Pipeline Gating: Speculation Control for Energy Reduction,” was part of the Ph.D. thesis work of Srilatha Manne, and was one of the first efforts to control the amount of speculation by automatically detecting when it was not effective or contributing to program performance and using that feedback to limit speculation. Dirk explains, “The speed of modern computers has increased both because of improved circuit technology and improved processor architecture or the way that those circuits are used. Speculation is one method that has been used to improve performance -- a speculative processor tries to predict the outcome of operations before they actually complete in order to start the execution of new operations that depend on those earlier operations; if the prediction is incorrect, the speculated operations must be canceled before they effect the program execution. When those predictions are correct, speculation can greatly improve processor performance, but it can also waste significant power when the predictions are wrong. Modern processors are largely limited by the power that they use, and current design techniques seek to limit speculation when it's not effective.“
Srilatha ("Bobbie") Manne was a Ph.D. student in the ECEE department supervised by Dirk Grunwald (CS and ECEE) and Fabio Somenzi (ECEE). Artur Klauser was a Ph.D. student in Computer Science. Both Bobbie and Artur graduated in 1999 and worked for Digital Equipment Corp., then Intel. Bobbie is currently a Principle Member of the Technical Staff at AMD and Artur is a Member of the Technical Staff at Google.