Towards Sentient Chips: Self-Awareness Through On-Chip Sensemaking

While the notion of self-awareness has a long history in biology, psychology, medicine, engineering and (more recently) computing, we are seeing the emerging need for self-awareness in the context of complex many-core chips that must address the (often conflicting) challenges of resiliency, energy, heat, cost, performance, security, etc., in the face of highly dynamic operational behaviors and environmental conditions. In this talk, Dutt will present the concept of Cyberphysical-Systems-on-Chip (CPSoC), a new class of sensor-actuator-rich, many-core computing platforms that intrinsically couple on-chip and cross-layer sensing and actuation to enable self-awareness. Unlike traditional Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs), CPSoC is distinguished by an intelligent co-design of the control, communication, and computing (C3) system that interacts with the physical environment in real time in order to modify the system's behavior so as to adaptively achieve desired objectives and Quality-of-Service (QoS). The CPSoC design paradigm enables self-awareness (i.e., the ability of the system to observe its own internal and external behaviors such that it is capable of making judicious decision) and (opportunistic) adaptation using the concept of cross-layer physical and virtual sensing and actuations applied across different layers of the hardware/software system stack. The closed loop control used for adaptation to dynamic variation—commonly known as the observe-decide-act (ODA) loop—is implemented using an adaptive, reflexive middleware layer. The learning abilities of CPSoC provide a unified interface API for sensor and actuator fusion along with the ability to improve autonomy in system management. The CPSoC paradigm is the first step towards a holistic software/hardware effort to make complex chips "sentient."

About the Speaker

Nikil Dutt is a Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Sciences, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1989). His research interests are in embedded systems, electronic design automation, computer architecture, compiler optimization, distributed systems, and brain-inspired architectures and computing. He has received numerous best paper awards and is coauthor of seven books. Dutt served as the editor in chief of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) (2003-2008) and as associate editor for ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (TVLSI). He has served on the steering, organizing, and program committees of several premier CAD and Embedded System Design conferences and workshops, and serves or has served on the advisory boards of ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED), ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA), ACM TECS and IEEE Embedded Systems Letters (ESL). Dutt is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and recipient of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Silver Core Award.

Event Topic

Distinguished Lecture Series