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Extreme Scale Design Automation Workshop


March 7-8, 2013

University Club at University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA, United States



Event Contact

CCC Staff
ccc@cra.org


Event Type

2013 Events, 2013 Visioning Activities, Visioning Activities, Workshop


Event Category

CCC

Overview

Workshop Goals

The objective was to develop a consensus around the following questions

  • What are most critical directions for EDA research in support of extreme scale designs? (e.g. validation, power optimization and control, resilient and self-evolving systems design, technology- and application software-aware tools are clearly such challenges)
  • What are potential new application domains for EDA? (computational biology, net-zero environmental impact systems, automotive?) Should EDA refocus on full systems?
  • To what extent should EDA research agenda and funding be driven by the industry? (given that industry focuses on the near term and is highly cyclical)
  • What are the best practices for collaboration between industry and academia? (considering the research and educational needs of the EDA community)
  • What are the educational priorities for EDA? (from the workforce perspective and also with cutting-edge research in mind)

 

Workshop Scope

Each of the three workshops addressed a portion of the computing landscape.

 

Workshop 1: Emerging Technologies and Workforce Continuity

Challenges for Emerging Technologies: there are a number of potentially disruptive ideas, which call for new device types, new interconnects and new ways to build chips to fundamentally alter the power, performance and cost profile of computing systems. Small examples of such chips, no matter how detailed, may not reliably establish the value of new techniques and risk to overlook significant pitfalls. On the other hand, working with full-sized systems that are not yet commercially viable is prohibitively expensive. This situation calls for relevant abstractions that allow researchers to address critical aspects of entire systems without having to spend resources on inconsequential details.

Ensuring the continuity of the workforce: The current state of affairs is aggravated by the dynamics of EDA education. We are confronted with a sagging interest by students in hardware design and particularly in electronic design automation. This is due in part to trendier specializations, such as social networking and machine learning, drawing students away from EDA jobs, as well as salary competition from companies rich with advertising revenue and high social appeal (e.g., Facebook and Google). Industry feedback indicates a shortage in qualified EDA professionals especially among fresh University graduates. While these professionals are avid users of electronics that depend heavily on the development and use of sophisticated EDA tools for their design and validation, they feel much more removed from the potential impact they could have on people’s lives should they devote their careers to the EDA field. While VLSI and architecture courses are an important part of the picture, the need for sophisticated EDA tools that can handle increased design complexity has been growing due to technology scaling, and will grow faster with the development of emerging technologies. Two additional challenges are (1) to develop better EDA education materials, comparable to those currently available in VLSI design and computer architecture, and (2) to make the EDA career more attractive to students.

 

Workshop 2: Extreme-Scale Chips and Industry Research

The second workshop will be held in Austin, Texas, June 2-3, 2013. The workshop will be co-located with the Design Automation Conference, and held in meeting rooms at the Austin convention center.

Challenges for Extreme-Scale Silicon Chips: individual devices may evolve from existing technologies, but the integration follows radically new scenarios and/or is super-optimized to achieve greater performance, lower power consumption, more tractable validation, etc. Again, small examples cannot always be sufficient for research on such systems, but full-sized systems are beyond the capabilities of most academic researchers. To faithfully represent realistic EDA challenges, public benchmarking infrastructure must be refreshed in sync with Moore’s law, tracking real designs. This has not been done in the past, but recent experience shows that abstracting particular challenges associated with scale enables powerful academic research helpful in designing next-generation systems.

 

Workshop 3: Achieving Sustainable Collaborations through Abstractions, Benchmarks, and Metrics

The third workshop will be held in San Jose, California, in November, co-located with the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design. Logistics for this meeting will be available shortly.

The third workshop will focus on unifying the work of the prior two events, and developing a comprehensive set of abstractions, milestones, and metrics, to outline a path forward for design automation. In particular, there will be an effort to develop a framework in which academia and industry can collaborate effectively.

In the past, EDA research has been driven by both academic and industry agendas. Industry representatives at SRC direct the flow of funding (some contributed by the NSF), but this funding has tended to target near-term problems specific to current industry needs. New models of collaboration with academia have been recently pioneered by IBM Research and Intel Labs, and our workshop will highlight such best practices where the industry actively works with the EDA community to formulate clean abstractions of key challenges, both near and far term, and follows up by providing independent evaluation of academic solutions.

 

Workshop Format and Anticipated Output:

Each of the workshops will feature keynote speakers to frame the key issues, followed by breakout group sessions in which participants will engage in open discussion. Participants will have opportunities to present their views and observations. Prior to each workshop, a set of survey questions will be provided, to further focus the discussions.

After each of the first two workshops, a summary of observations will be prepared by the workshop organizers. A final report, unifying the work of all three workshops, will be prepared, approximately 6 weeks after the final meeting.

 

Agenda

March 7, 2013 (Thursday)

08:30 AM Breakfast
09:00 AM Workshop opening and introduction

Alex Jones, University of Pittsburgh

09:30 AM Keynote: A Day in the Life of a 7nm Chip Architect

Bob Colwell, DARPA

10:30 AM Coffee Break
11:00 AM Short Talks by Participants, Theme New Markets
12:30 PM Working Lunch: Breakout sessions
02:00 PM Summarize Findings
03:00 PM Coffee Break
03:15 PM Brief Introduction: The role of education and workforce continuity to revive EDA
03:30 PM Keynote: Reinvigorating EDA in the social media era

Patrick Groeneveld, Synopsys

04:30 PM Short Talks by Participants
05:30 PM Break
06:00 PM Dinner at University Club

March 8, 2013 (Friday)

08:30 AM Breakfast
09:00 AM Working Breakout Sessions
10:00 AM Summarize Findings
11:00 AM Coffee Break
11:30 AM Closing Discussion
12:30 AM Lunch
Participants

bahar

Iris Bahar

Brown University
Web site

basu

Sankar Basu

National Science Foundation

Web site

bryant

Randy Bryant

Carnegie Mellon University

Web site

chen

Yiran Chen

University of Pittsburgh

Web site

colwell

Robert Colwell

DARPA

Web site (BROKEN LINK)

faeder

Jim Faeder

University of Pittsburgh

Web site

avatar m

Patrick Groenveld

Synopsys

harris

Ian Harris

University of California at Irvine

Web site

mark

Mark Johnson

Purdue University

Web site

avatar m

Alex Jones

University of Pittsburgh

Web site

katkoori

Srinivas Katkoori

University of South Florida

Web site

levitan

Steve Levitan

University of Pittsburgh

Web site

avatar w

Hai Li

University of Pittsburgh

Web site (BROKEN LINK)

xinli

Xin Li

Carnegie Mellon University

Web site

madden

Patrick Madden

The State University of New York at Binghamton

Web site

marculescu

Diana Marculescu

Carnegie Mellon University

Web site

miskov

Natasa Miskov-Zivanov

University of Pittsburgh

Web site (BROKEN LINK)

avatar m

Kartik Mohanram

University of Pittsburgh

Web site

sapatnekar

Sachin Sapatnekar

University of Minnesota

Web site

scheffer

Lou Scheffer

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Web site

thomas

Don Thomas

Carnegie Mellon University

Web site

torella

Josep Torrellas

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Web site

 

Organizing Committee:

Iris Bahar
Brown University

Alex Jones
University of Pittsburgh

Srinivas Katkoori
University of South Florida

Patrick Madden
The State University of New York at Binghamton

Diana Marculescu
Carnegie Mellon University

Igor Markov
University of Michigan

Logistics

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will cover travel expenses for all participants who desire it. Participants will be asked to make their own travel arrangements in advance, including purchasing airline tickets and making hotel reservations at the workshop hotel (see above). Following the symposium, CCC will circulate a reimbursement form that participants will need to complete and submit, along with copies of receipts for amounts exceeding $75.

In general, standard Federal travel policies apply: CCC will reimburse for non-refundable economy airfare on U.S. Flag carriers; and no alcohol will be covered.

For more information on Federal reimbursement guidelines, please follow the links below:
General Travel
International Travel

Additional questions about the reimbursement policy should be directed to Kenneth Hines, Program Associate, CCC (khines [at] cra.org).

Resources

EDA at the End of Moore’s Law
Bob Colwell

Reinvigorating EDA in the Social Media Era
Patrick Groeneveld

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