Server Architecture for the Post-Moore Era

Datacenters are growing at unprecedented speeds fueled by the demand
on global IT services,
investments in massive data analytics and economies of scale.
Worldwide data by some accounts (e.g., IDC)
grows at much higher rates than server capability and capacity.
Conventional silicon technologies laying the
foundation for server platforms, however, have dramatically slowed
down in efficiency and density scaling in recent years.
The latter, now referred to as the post-Moore era, has given rise to a
plethora of emerging logic and
memory technologies presenting exciting new challenges and abundant
opportunities from algorithms to platforms
for server designers. In this talk, I will first motivate the
post-Moore era for server architecture and present avenues
to pave the path forward for server design.
Babak Falsafi is a Professor in the School of Computer and
Communication Sciences and the founding
director of the EcoCloud research center at EPFL. He has worked on
server architecture for
some time with contributions impacting industrial products and
platforms including the
WildFire/WildCat family of multiprocessors by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle),
memory system technologies in IBM BlueGene and ARM cores, and server
evaluation methodologies
in use by AMD, HPE and Google (PerfKit). His recent work on scale-out
server processor design
lays the foundation for Cavium ThunderX. He is a fellow of ACM and IEEE.