Mark Tremblay

Title:  High Performance Throughput Computing

September 18, 2008, 3 p.m.

Abstract:  High-Performance Throughput Computing, achieved through designed-from-scratch processors composed of multiple multithreaded cores, offers an unprecedented opportunity to create a new generation of pipelines that deliver both high throughput performance and high single-thread performance.

A checkpoint-based architecture that offers a new execution model, perhaps the only novel one in over a decade, forms the cornerstone of the Rock microprocessor. Hardware threads are spawned and they speculatively execute and retire
instructions out-of-order. Power efficiency is emphasized by maximizing the utilization of pipeline stages, through temporal threading, and functional units, through spatial threading and speculation. This pipeline is organized in an hierarchical manner in the 16-core 65nm Rock microprocessor.

As important as the Throughput Computing paradigm, is the enablement of parallel software. Rock should be the first processor to support Transactional Memory, a leading candidate to deliver high-performance scalable parallel applications through composable software.

Bio:  Dr. Marc Tremblay is a Sun Fellow, senior Vice President, and CTO for Sun's Microelectronics Group. In his role, Tremblay sets future directions for Sun's processor and system roadmap. His mission is to move Sun Microsystems' entire SPARC processor product line to the Throughput Computing paradigm, incorporating techniques he has helped develop over the past several years, including: Chip Multiprocessing, Chip Multithreading, speculative multithreading, scout threading and Transactional Memory.

Prior to his current position, he was co-architect for Sun's UltraSPARC I, the MDR Microprocessor of the Year in 1995, and chief architect for the UltraSPARC II microprocessor. He was also the chief architect for the MAJC Program which was nominated for best emerging technology in 1999 and best media processor in 2000 by MDR Analysts. He also started and was the architect of the picoJava processor core, a Java bytecode engine. He is the father of Rock (in addition to two boys), a high-end microprocessor with many innovative features that should enable a more parallel software world.

Dr. Tremblay earned a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and a B.S. in Physics Engineering from Laval University in Canada. He is a named inventor on 136 U.S. patents in various areas of computer architecture and was nominated for Innovator of the Year by EDN Magazine in 1999. He recently appeared as a one of the “100 Most Influential People in IT” published by eWeek and was featured in Business Week on the energy consumed by servers in data centers. He has presented multiple keynote addresses at such conferences as: International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA-2004), International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS-2006), Principles Of Distributed Computing (PODC-2007), etc. Dr. Tremblay taught a graduate course on computer architecture at Stanford in 2002 and is a member of IEEE and ACM.