Increasing complexity of hardware innovation may put chip-savvy software developers in the driver’s seat.

Are software developers keeping Moore’s Law alive? That’s the theory one researcher put forth at a recent university research event in San Francisco.

Krste Asanovic, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, described how critical software has become to harnessing the power of increasingly powerful processors, especially in mobile devices.  For full article Here.

Short interview with Krste Asanovic: Can Software Save Moore’s Law?

The SEJITS component of  ASPIRE is designed to dramatically simplify creating performant and energy-efficient code that can be retargeted to a variety of platforms.  Originally begun as part of the Par Lab, the SEJITS approach uses domain-specific languages embedded in Python to generate fast, efficient code for an underlying hardware platform.

Peter Birsinger, Richard Xia, Shoaib Kamil, and Armando Fox of ASPIRE will present a short paper at the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2013) on “Scalable Bootstrapping for Python”.  The paper introduces a SEJITS specializer, or DSEL (domain-specific embedded language) compiler, for the Bag of Little Bootstraps (BLB), a recently developed bootstrapping algorithm designed for distributed environments.  We already had a BLB specializer that generated OpenMP or Cilk code for multicore CPUs; we’ve now extended it to generate code for Spark, a cluster-based MapReduce-like computing platform.  That means a data scientist can write a single, serial Python program that can run “toy” problems in plain Python, non-toy problems that fit on a single computer in OpenMP or Cilk with good parallel performance, and much larger problems with large datasets on a multi-computer Spark installation.

In this paper we evaluated the performance of the generated Spark BLB code on an email classifier for the Enron public email corpus and an  estimator of 2-gram word frequency ratios across different decades using data from the Google N-gram dataset (201 GB).  The experiments show strong scaling from 4 to 32 Amazon EC2 nodes (32 to 256 cores).

We are currently working with Dr. Gerald Friedland and others at ICSI to apply this specializer to multimedia classification problems.

We welcome Google to the ASPIRE Lab as an industrial affiliate.  Google is interested in increasing the efficiency of warehouse-scale computing.

UC Berkeley has joined a global alliance of premier medical, research and disease prevention organizations that aims to create an international database of shared genomic and clinical data.

Read full article Here

The AMPLab is part of a Berkeley tradition of creating 5-year multidisciplinary projects that build prototypes to demonstrate the project vision and depend on biannual retreats for feedback and open shared space to inspire collaboration.

After being involved in a dozen centers over nearly 40 years, I decided to capture my advice on building and running research centers . Following the precedent of my past efforts at  ”How to Give a Bad Talk” and “How to Have a Bad Career“, I just finished a short technical paper entitled “How to Build a Bad Research Center.”

As a teaser, below are my Eight Commandments to follow to build a bad research center:

1. Thou shalt not mix disciplines in a center. It is difficult for people from different disciplines to talk to each other, as they don’t share a common culture or vocabulary.  Thus, multiple disciplines waste time, and therefore precious research funding. Instead, remain pure.
2. Thou shalt expand centers. Expanse is measured geographically, not intellectually. For example, in the US the ideal is having investigators from 50 institutions in all 50 states, as this would make a funding agency look good to the US Senate.
3. Thou shalt not limit the duration of a center. To demonstrate your faith in the mission of the center, you should be willing to promise to work on it for decades. (Or at least until the funding runs out.)
4. Thou shalt not build a graven prototype. Integrating results in a center-wide prototype takes time away from researchers’ own, more important, private research.
5. Thou shalt not disturb thy neighbors. Good walls make good researchers; isolation reduces the chances of being distracted from your work.
6. Thou shalt not talk to strangers. Do not waste time convening meetings to present research to outsiders; following the 8th commandment, reviews of your many papers supply sufficient feedback.
7. Thou shalt make decisions as a consensus of equals. The US Congress is a sterling example of making progress via consensus.
8. Thou shalt honor thy paper publishers. Thus, to ensure center success, you must write, write, write and cite, cite, cite. If the conference acceptance rate is 1/X, then obviously you should submit at least X papers, for otherwise chances are that your center will not have a paper at every conference, which is a catastrophe.

A video of my presentation launching ASPIRE at the BEARS conference is now available.

We welcome Nokia Research to the ASPIRE lab as an industrial affiliate. Nokia is interested in reducing design time and increasing flexibility of mobile devices, while staying within a very constrained power budget.

The ASPIRE project at UC Berkeley has received a $15.6M award over 5.5 years as part of the DARPA PERFECT program. The ASPIRE project will be investigating how to provide the utmost energy efficiency for future DoD high-performance embedded applications, with an integrated effort spanning applications, algorithms, programming systems, architectures, and resilient circuits.  The program has an ambitious goal of achieving over 75GLOPS/W for double-precision computations in an entire system, or approximately 50x greater energy efficiency than the best of today’s embedded systems.