Babak Falsafi is a computer scientist specializing in computer architecture and digital platform design. He is the founding director of EcoCloud at
EPFL, an industrial/academic consortium investigating efficient and intelligent data-centric technologies. He is a professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at
EPFL. Prior to that he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at
Carnegie Mellon University, and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at
Purdue University. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science, a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering (both summa cum laude) with distinctions from SUNY Buffalo, and a master's degree and PhD in computer science from University Wisconsin - Madison.
He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a server architecture[1] which laid the foundation for Sun Microsystems' NUMA machines,[2] technologies to minimize (leakage) power in the memory system in the absence of activity (Supply Gating)[3] and in shared memory (Snoop Filtering)[4] prevalent in modern CPUs and multi-socket servers, and memory system accelerators [5] in modern (ARM) CPUs in mobile platforms. He has shown that hardware memory consistency models are neither necessary (in the 90's)[6] nor sufficient (a decade later)[7] to achieve high performance in multiprocessor systems. These results eventually led to fence speculation in modern (x86) CPUs. He argued and demonstrated that the slowdown in silicon efficiency (Dennard's Law) and density scaling (Moore's Law) would lead to
Dark Silicon and specialization in servers.[8] These results led to a follow-on study on careful characterization of scale-out workloads on server platforms [9] which laid the foundation for the first generation of Cavium ARM server CPUs, ThunderX.
He is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, was named an
ACM Fellow in 2015 [10]for contributions to multiprocessor and memory architecture design and evaluation and a
Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012[11]for contributions to multiprocessor architecture and memory systems.
^Powell, Michael; Yang, Se-Hyun; Falsafi, Babak; Roy, Kaushik; Vijaykumar, T. N. (2000).
"Gated-Vdd". Proceedings of the 2000 international symposium on Low power electronics and design - ISLPED '00. pp. 90–95.
doi:
10.1145/344166.344526.
ISBN9781581131901.
S2CID3241652.
^Somogyi, Stephen; Wenisch, Thomas F.; Ailamaki, Anastasia; Falsafi, Babak; Moshovos, Andreas (2006).
"Spatial Memory Streaming". Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 34 (2): 252–263.
doi:
10.1145/1150019.1136508.
S2CID3552110.
^Gniady, Chris; Falsafi, Babak; Vijaykumar, T. N. (1999).
"Is SC + ILP = RC?". Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 27 (2): 162–171.
doi:10.1145/307338.300993.
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