Billions of people rely on web services powered by data centers, where critical applications run 24/7. Unfortunately, data center applications are extremely inefficient, wasting more than 60% of all processor cycles, and causing millions of dollars in operational expenses and energy costs. In this talk, I will present an overview of my vision to overcome this inefficiency using hardware/software co-design. In particular, I will focus on (1) systems interfaces using which software can reason about hardware inefficiencies; and (2) architectural abstractions using which software can avoid hardware inefficiencies. Finally, I will conclude by describing my ongoing and future research on democratizing hardware/software co-design to enable efficiency across the systems stack.

Speaker Bio:  

Prof. Tanvir Ahmed Khan is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. His research brings together computer architecture, compilers, and operating systems to enable efficient data center processing. Consequently, his work has been adopted by Intel and ARM to improve the performance of data center applications. Bridging hardware and software, his research appears in venues like ISCA, MICRO, OSDI, PLDI, FAST, and EuroSys. His work has also been recognized with the MICRO 2022 Best Paper Award, DATE 2023 Best Paper Award Nomination, IEEE Micro Top Picks 2023 distinction, and multiple fellowships.