News

News from CSC website: http://www.cse.psu.edu/news/2013/20130211-1

Guangyu Sun (CSE Ph.D. 2011) has been selected to receive the 2012 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) for his dissertation "Exploring Memory Hierarchy Design with Emerging Memory Technologies." The award will be presented in March at the DATE 2013 conference in Grenoble, France. This award is among the most prestigious awards for Ph.D. dissertations in the field of electronic design automation (EDA). The thesis explored high performance, low power, and high reliability memory hierarchy design using emerging memory technologies including STTRAM, PCM, etc. These emerging memories have advantages of high density, near-zero static power, and immunity to soft errors, which offer potential for overcoming the "memory wall." Since these emerging memory technologies have different characters, the following three questions should be answered to achieve the design goals: (1) how to choose the proper memory technologies in different levels of the memory hierarchy? (2) how to improve the memory architecture to facilitate the adoption of these emerging memories? (3) how to leverage the advantages of multiple memory technologies? In this thesis, these questions are answered from different angles. First, proper emerging memory technologies are employed in the memory hierarchy with novel architecture modification. At the same time, the hybrid memory structure is proposed to leverage advantages from multiple memory technologies. Second, an analytical model named "Moguls" is introduced to quantitatively explore the optimization design of a memory hierarchy. Third, the vulnerability of the CMPs to radiation-based soft errors is improved by replacing different levels of on-chip memory with STT-RAMs. Upon concluding his doctoral studies at Penn State, Sun is now an assistant professor at the Center for Energy-efficient Computing and Applications in the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University. His research interests include computer architecture, VLSI design, and electronics design automation (EDA). Sun's advisor was Professor Yuan Xie.