computer engineering

f a l l 2 0 1 4 CoEneWS

Childers, Jones, and Mossé Lead Effort in Improving the Science of Computing Research

Computer science and engineering research increasingly relies on numerous ad hoc methods to explore research breakthroughs, particularly during

empirical and statistical analysis, modeling, optimization and simulation of complex computer systems. These ad hoc methods are utilized due to a variety of factors including problem complexity and size, speed of advancement and return on investment, cost of designing prototypes, and minimal access to state-of-the-art fabrication. To address this problem, Pitt computer engineering professors Bruce Childers (CS), Alex Jones (ECE), and Daniel Mossé (CS) are developing OCCAM (Open Curation for Computer Architecture Modeling).

OCCAM is developed in response to the lack of a common experimental meth-odology, and lack of simple and unified mechanisms, tools and repositories to preserve and exchange the whole experimental setup including all past research artifacts. This makes it excessively challenging or even impossible to accurately reproduce experimental results for evaluation and future advancement. The goal of the project is to develop a community-supported digital curator for computer architecture artifacts including simulation, emulation, benchmarking, and

experimental results. Ultimately, a shared instrument is envisioned for computer architecture research to save time for researchers, improve openness and access to evaluation methodologies and results, and to advance science.

“The approach was inspired by Occam’s Razor, which suggests a successful strategy for problem solving utilizes the minimum possible assumptions and most succinctness,” said Childers, the project’s principal investigator. “By build-ing a foundation of support from the community, we hope the OCCAM approach and shared resources will increase openness of experimental methodologies, promote more reproducible experiments, and support better ways to evaluate new ideas both against previous approaches and more workloads.”

The team has hosted several community-oriented activities to shape the capabilities of the OCCAM including Birds of a Feather Session at SC 2011 and 2012, an NSF workshop and activities at MICRO, HiPEAC, ISCA, and HPCA. For more information, current status of the community resource, and to join the effort there is a survey and more information available at http://occamportal.org.

Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh continues to reach new heights in scholarship and research. In 2013, our faculty was ranked

5th in percentage of faculty with research funding and 8th in terms of conference publications per faculty member out of 120 computer engineering programs as reported by Academic Analytics quantitative performance benchmarks.

Our faculty has developed a cohesive strength in the area of emerging memory with considerable funded activities in spin-transfer torque magnetic,

phase-change, and resistive storage technologies. This has recently been complemented by tradi-tional and new computing paradigms using Fin-FET, graphene, memristor, and spin-torque oscillator technologies. These activities supplement continued strength and leadership in the more traditional areas of computer architecture, high-performance computing, and design automation highlighted by six current NSF CAREER awards and several multi-million dollar grants.

The student population also reflects this trend. Over the last five years our computer engineering enrollment has dramatically increased by more than 40 percent while standards continue to rise

for admission. For example, in 2014, computer engineering boasts a Goldwater Scholarship and Gilman International Scholarship winner, among other achievements.

It is my pleasure to share some of the recent activities and accomplishments of our Computer Engineering faculty and students in this newsletter.

Sincerely,

Alex K. Jones, PhD Director, Computer Engineering

CoE Welcome

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Pitt Research Team Part of $10 Million NSF Grant to Develop “Visual Cortex on Silicon”Innovation Would Lead to Enhanced Computer Image Recognition Interfaces

Developing a computer that can see the world like the human brain’s complex visual cortex has been a long-sought

challenge. Thanks to a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), that challenge may be a future reality.

A University of Pittsburgh research team is part of a seven-university group led by Principle Investigator Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, PhD, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, that will receive an NSF CISE Expeditions in Computing awards, the largest single investment in computer science research that NSF makes.

The Pitt team, which will be funded by $500,000 of the total grant, is led by Steven P. Levitan, PhD, the John A. Jurenko Professor of Computer Engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering; and Donald M. Chiarulli, PhD, Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science in Pitt’s Department of Computer Science. Student researchers are undergraduates Soyo Awosika-Olumo, Natalie Janosek and Andrew Seel; and graduate students John Carpenter and Yan Fang. Other collaborating institutions include University of Southern California, Stanford University, York College of Pennsylvania, University of California-San Diego, University of California-Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to the NSF’s announcement, this project envisions a holistic design of a machine vision system that will approach or exceed the capabili-ties and efficiencies of human vision, enabling computers to not only record images, but also to understand visual content, at up to a thousand times the efficiency of current technologies.

While several machine vision systems today can each successfully perform one or a few human tasks – such as detecting human faces in point-and-shoot cameras – they are still limited in their ability to perform a wide range of visual tasks, to operate in complex, cluttered environments, and to provide reasoning for their decisions. In contrast, the visual cortex in mammals excels in a broad variety of goal-oriented cognitive tasks, and is at least three orders of magnitude more energy efficient than customized state-of-the-art machine vision systems.

In particular, this Expedition aims to understand the fundamental mechanisms used in the visual cortex, with the hope of enabling the design of new vision algorithms and hardware fabrics that can improve power, speed, flexibility, and recognition accuracies relative to existing machine vision systems.

Because of the complexity of the human visual cortex, which processes image data faster than a computer, the teams are applying their expertise across multiple systems. Pitt’s Levitan and

Chiarulli are investigating the resonance of coupled low power electronic oscillators to perform image processing in silicon. “The underlying principle is not new – in fact, in 1665, Christiaan Huygens discovered that two pendulum clocks mounted to the same wall would synchronize their swings, no matter how they were started,” Dr. Levitan explains. “This self-synchronization property of coupled oscillators can be used as a measure of similarity in large scale pattern matching problems.”

Using emerging nano-technologies like electro-magnetic spin torque oscillators, they are exploiting this locking phenomenon to match patterns in visual images. “Imagine a vast sea of organ pipes, each tuned to one frequency. If you then play a note in the air, the pipe tuned closest to that note will resonate. If we identify the pipe, we know which note it was; that is the basic idea.”

Dr. Chiarulli adds, “Traditional Boolean logic – the 1s and 0s or true/false values that comprise computer systems – is not capable of the nuanced pattern matching and image analysis that the human brain does many times per second using less than ten watts of power. This work is focused on new computational models that can work more like a human brain model of computation in solving the problem of visual perception.”

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Rami Melhem, PhD

BioBrief The University of Pittsburgh Provost Award for Excellence in Mentoring (2012).

Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, IEEE (2000 - ).

2000-2009 Chair of the Computer Science Dept., University of Pittsburgh

Recent Significant Grants

QNRF: Scalable Analytics Engine for Big Graphs on the Cloud – with M. Hammoud (CMU-Qatar), $269,395 to U. Pitt, October 2014 – September 2017

Samsung: Constructing Scalable, Energy Efficient and Reliable Main Memory with STT-MRAM – with A. Jones, $276,755, February 2014 – January 2016

NSF: CCF: Medium Compiler and Chip Multiprocessor Co-design for Scalable Efficient Data Access and Communication – with A. Jones and S. Cho, $800,000, March 2011 – March 2015

NSF: CSR: Large: Storage Class Memory Architecture for Energy Efficient Data Centers – with B. Childers, S. Cho, D. Mosse, J. Yang and Y. Zhang, $1,912,127, July 2010 – June 2014

Edited Book

Power Aware Computing, editors: R. Graybill and R. Melhem, Kluwer/Plenum Publishers (2002)

Smart machine vision systems that understand and interact with their environments could have a profound impact on society, including aids for visually impaired persons, driver assistance capabilities for reducing automotive accidents, and augmented reality systems for enhanced shopping, travel, and safety.

“Advances in the computer and information sciences drive progress in all areas of science, engineering and education, which positively impacts the U.S. economy, furthers national priorities and bolsters our overall quality of life,” said NSF Acting Director Cora Marrett. “America’s future depends on strong and sustained U.S. government support in this area. NSF is proud to fund this next round of Expeditions awards, and in supporting fundamental research, to continue its tradition of enabling the nation to maintain its competitive advantage in information technology.”

The first Expeditions awards were made in 2008. As of today, 16 awards have been made through this program, addressing subjects ranging from foundational research in computing hardware,

software and verification to research in sustainable energy, health information technology, robotics, mobile computing, and Big Data.

“The Expeditions in Computing program catalyzes large-scale, far-reaching and potentially transfor-mative research motivated by deep scientific questions,” said Farnam Jahanian, assistant director for CISE. “These two new awards aim to apply our understanding of natural, biological capabilities to the development of revolutionary new computing and information technologies with tremendous potential for societal benefit.”

“Without exception, the Expeditions in Computing awards fund bold, ambitious and exciting research,” said Mitra Basu, program director for the Expeditions program. “We are now seeing how they advance the field and lead to exciting results in a variety of applications. We’re confident that these two projects have the same potential for pushing the frontiers of computing.”

Pictured left to right are Drs. Levitan and Chiarulli.

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Yiran Chen, PhD Appointed Associate Professor with Tenure

Dr. Chen received his B.S. and M.S. (both with honor) from Tsinghua University

and PhD from Purdue University. His research interests include data storage architecture, low-power design, emerging technologies and embedded systems. Dr. Chen has published one book, several book chapters, and more than 170 technical publications in refereed journals and conferences. He has also been granted 83 US patents with other 17 pending applications. He is the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on CAD of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Com-puting Systems (JETC), and ACM SIGDA e-news.

He has been serving various roles in the techni-cal and organization committees of more than 30 international conferences, including DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, ISLPED, FPT, ISCAS,

CODES+ISSS, ICONIP, RTCAS, etc. His work received “The hot 100 products of 2006” from EDN, the finalist of “Prestigious 2007 DesignVision Awards” from International Engineering Consortium (IEC) and “PrimeTimeVX - EDN 100 Hot Products Distinction” from Synopsys Inc. He received three best paper awards from ISQED 2008 and ISLPED 2010, GLSVLSI 2013, respectively, and seven times best paper nominations. He is the recipient of NSF CAREER award (2013), the 2014 Outstanding New Faculty Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA), and the participants of 2013 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. Dr. Chen is the pioneer of e-business in China and co-founded www.welan.com (www.wl.cn), the 4th biggest online book store in China.

ACM SIGDA Names Pitt’s Dr. Yiran Chen as Outstanding New Faculty Award Winner for 2014

Dr. Yiran Chen was named the 2014 recipient of the Outstanding New Faculty Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on

Design Automation (SIGDA). The award was presented at the annual Design Automation Conference on June 3 in San Francisco.

The SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award recognizes a junior faculty member early in her or his academic career who demonstrates outstanding potential as an educator and/or researcher in the field of electronic design automation. While prior research and/or teaching accomplishments are important, the selection committee considers the impact that the candidate has had on her or his department and on the EDA field during the initial years of their academic appointment.

Dr. Chen’s research interests include nano-electronic devices (silicon and non-silicon), low-power circuit design and computer architecture, emerging memory technologies, nano-scale reconfigurable computing system and sensor system, energy harvesting for alternative renewable energy.

Yiran ChenAssociate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

PhD in Computer Science, Purdue University (2005)

Recent Awards and Accomplishments

Outstanding New Faculty Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) (2014)

National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2013)

Invited Participant, U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium of National Academy of Engineering (2013)

Recent Significant Grants

Samsung Global MRAM Innovation “ECC Designs for High-Performance High-Reliable STT-MRAM,” $90,000, 2/1/14-1-31-15.

National Science Foundation “XPS: DSD: Collaborative Research: NeoNexus: The Next-generation Information Processing System,” CCF- 1337198, $725,884, 9/1/13-8/31/17, (Co-PI) with Qinru Qiu (PI), Syracuse University, and Hai Li, University of Pittsburgh.

National Science Foundation “CAREER: Centaur: A Bio-inspired Ultra Low-Power Hybrid Embedded Computing Engine Beyond One TeraFlops/Watt,” CNS- 1253424, $450,000, 6/1/13-5/31/18.

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Hai “Helen” LiAssistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University (2004)

Recent Awards and Accomplishments

DARPA Young Faculty Award (2013)

National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2012)

Invited Participant, U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium of National Academy of Engineering (2013)

Recent Significant Grants

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) “An Adaptive Information Processing System Resilient to Device Variations and Noises,” $500,000, 8/1/13-7/31/15.

National Science Foundation “CAREER: STT-RAM based Memory Hierarchy and Management in Embedded Systems,” CNS- 1311706, $450,000, 9/1/12-8/31/15.

National Science Foundation “Collaborative Research: SMURFS: Statistical Modeling, SimUlation and Robust Design Techniques For MemriStors,” ECCS- 1202225, $500,149, 5/1/12-4/30/15, (PI) with Yiran Chen, University of Pittsburgh.

Research Paper Co-authored by Dr. Alex Jones Recognized as

One of the Top 25 in Its Field by IEEE FCCM

A paper co-authored by Alex Jones, PhD, associate professor of electrical and

computer engineering and Director of the Computer Engineering program at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, was named one of top 25 most influential papers from the IEEE Field Programmable and Custom Computing Machines Conference (FCCM). “A MATLAB compiler for distributed, heterogeneous, reconfigurable computing systems” (2000) was recognized in part for providing “a first step in the development of the MATLAB compilation tools in Xilinx System Generator that are used by thousands of engineers annually.”

FCCM, which marked its 20th anniversary in 2013, is the premiere IEEE conference on field programmable computer hardware. Dr. Jones’ paper is in the top 5% of all papers presented

at the conference over its 20-year duration. The paper was recommended by Russell Tessier, PhD, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“It is a tremendous honor to be recognized in this fashion by my peers,” Dr. Jones said. “I am just pleased to have been able to make contributions to this work with my colleagues and that the technique lives on as commercial tool which benefits FPGA designers throughout the world.”

The paper’s co-authors included Prithviraj Banerjee, U. Nagaraj Shenoy, Alok Choudhary, Scott Hauck, Christopher Bachmann, Malay Haldar, Pramod Joisha, Alex Jones, Abhay Kanhare, Anshuman Nayak, Suresh Periyacheri, Michael Walkden, and David Zaretsky.

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Computer Engineering Research Group Recognized at ACM GLSVLSI 2013 Conference in Paris

A paper presented by a Computer Engineering research group at the Swanson School of

Engineering was awarded best paper at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) GLSVLSI 2013 conference in Paris. The paper, “Coordinating Prefetching and STT-RAM based Last-level Cache Management for Multicore Systems,” was recognized as a best paper candidate selected anonymously by the program committee and included in a plenary session with the other nominees.

The paper was co-authored by graduate student Mengjie Mao and professors Yiran Chen, Alex Jones and Helen Li.

The paper was selected by a special committee who read and re-reviewed all of the best paper nominees and considered the conference presentations. GLSVLSI had a 21% acceptance rate and is consistently the leading ACM meeting on VLSI with a similarly competitive acceptance rate. There were 51 papers accepted for oral presentation with well over 200 papers submitted placing the paper in the top 2% of accepted papers and better than the top 1% of submissions.

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Computer Engineering Student Emily Crabb Receives 2014 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship

University of Pittsburgh student Emily Crabb has been named a 2014 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship winner for

her outstanding undergraduate research in engineering and her commitment to pursuing a career in science. A native of Royersford, Pa., in her third year of study at Pitt, Crabb is majoring in computer engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering and majoring in physics in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.

In addition, three Pitt students have received Honorable Mention designations in the national 2014 Goldwater Scholarship competition: Andrew Abboud, a junior from Troy, Ohio, majoring in biological sciences and religious studies; Angela Beck, a junior from Monongahela, Pa., majoring in bioengineering; and Alexandre Gauthier, a junior from Charlotte, N.C, majoring in physics.

“The Goldwater Scholarship is the highest honor that can be won by undergraduate students studying science, math, or engineering, and we are proud of the recognition the Pitt students have received,” said Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg. “The ever-expanding record of student achievement at Pitt is reflective of the University’s dedication to education both inside and outside classrooms. Encouraging

the development of human potential remains our most fundamental mission.”

Established in 1986 by the U.S. Congress, the Goldwater Scholarship was named for then- Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona and encourages outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering. The prestigious honor is awarded

in either a student’s sophomore or junior year and goes toward covering tuition, room and board, fees, and books for the recipient’s remaining period of study.

Since her freshman year at Pitt, Crabb has conducted research within the laboratory of Anna Balazs, a Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and the Robert Von der Luft Professor in the Swanson School. Crabb’s research interests include studying the physics of nanoscopic and microscopic systems. In 2013, she coauthored the academic papers “Harnessing Fluid-driven Vesicles to Pick Up and Drop Off Janus Particles” and “Self-healing Vesicles Deposit Lipid-coated Janus Particles into Nanoscopic Trenches,” which were published in the journals ACS Nano and Langmuir, respectively. Crabb also presented her research findings on the behavior of lipid vesicles in solution at the 2013 American Physical Society conference.

“Even before entering college, I knew I wanted to study science because of my love of math and physics. Having the opportunity to work in a scientific research lab at the University of Pittsburgh has solidified my desire to pursue a career in scientific research,” said Crabb.“I enjoy predicting the outcomes of simulation experiments and then

CoE PhD DissertationsYONG LI “Software-oriented Data Access Characterization for Chip-multiprocessor Architecture Optimizations.” Advisor: Alex K. Jones, PhD

ZHENYU SUN “High-performance and Low-power Magnetic Material Memory-based Cache Design.” Advisor: Hai “Helen” Li, PhD

BO ZHAO “Improving Phase Change Memory (PCM) and Spin-torque-transfer Magnetic-RAM (STT-MRAM) as Next-generation Memories: A Circuit Perspective.” Advisor: Jun Yang, PhD

Adam Lee, PhD Joins Five Other Computer Engineering Faculty with Active NSF CAREER Awards

Adam J. Lee is the most recent computer engineering faculty recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. Lee joined the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor of computer

engineering and computer science in 2008. This award is the most recent NSF grant awarded to Lee as Principal Investigator in the past five years in the area of security and privacy totaling more than $3.5 Million in support.

Lee’s CAREER award “UCPriv: User-Centric Privacy Management” promises to develop computational tools that enable everyday users to better manage their computing system participation by understanding the interplay between security, privacy, and utility. It allows individuals to (i) quantitatively specify and assess their security, privacy, and utility goals; (ii) qualitatively express preferences on the relative importance of these goals; (iii) explore the implications of their system interactions by leveraging the trade-off spaces resulting from these quantitative and qualitative specifications; and (iv) enact locally-enforceable changes to their system usage to better balance competing needs.

Computer engineering faculty have had an exceptional recent track record in receiving CAREER awards from the NSF. Lee joins Yiran Chen, Kartik Mohanram, Hai “Helen” Li, Jun Yang, and Youtao Zhang as computer engineering faculty with recent or active CAREER awards.

The CAREER award is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

“I am very excited about this award,” notes Lee. “The five-year term of a CAREER award gives my students and I long term stability to develop new theories of user-centric privacy

preservation, develop testbeds, and conduct user studies to validate our theories. Given the diversity of goals that we hope to achieve, this is essential to our success.”

Lee’s research was also recently recognized with the Outstanding Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY) in May 2014 for his paper “On the Suitability of Dissemination-centric Access Control Systems for Group-centric Sharing.” This paper made use of novel analysis techniques to answer several open questions regarding the expressive power and utility of a recently proposed group-centric access control model. His co-authors were his graduate students William C. Garrison III and Yechen Qiao.

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puzzling over why different things actually happen as well as discussing ideas and planning new experiments with other researchers. I also relish in communicating my results, whether through co-authoring papers or presenting a poster, and these activities are highlights of my research experience and hopefully my future.”

This past year, Crabb studied computer engineering abroad at the École Nationale Supérieure de l’Électronique et de ses Applications in Cergy, France. After graduating from Pitt, Crabb plans to earn a PhD degree in physics and pursue a career conducting theoretical physics research as well as international collaborative research.

Crabb’s awards and accolades include the University of Pittsburgh’s Honors Tuition Scholarship, the Pittsburgh Foundation’s Thomas Lain Scholarship, and the Russell Vohr Beckett and Hazel Ley Beckett Scholarship in Electrical and Computer Engineering. A 2011 National Merit Scholar, Crabb was inducted into the Tau Beta Pi Association, the oldest engineering honor society in the United States, in 2013.

In addition to being an active member of the Tau Beta Pi Association, Crabb’s professional affiliations include the American Nuclear Society, the Society of Physics Students, and the Society of Women Engineers.

Crabb is the 42nd Pitt student to have won a Goldwater Scholarship since 1995. She joins an elite group of former Pitt Goldwater honorees, some of whom have gone on to receive prestigious postgraduate awards: Pitt’s 2007 Rhodes Scholar Daniel Armanios, 2006 Rhodes Scholar Justin Chalker, and 2007 Marshall Scholar Anna Quider.

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UnivERsity of PittsbURgH | swanson SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING | C o E NEWS | FALL 2014

Ademusoyo Awosika-Olumo Receives Gilman International Scholarship

Swanson School undergraduate Ademusoyo (“Soyo”) Awosika-Olumo was the recipient of a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, offers grants for U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited

financial means to pursue academic studies or credit-bearing, career-oriented internships abroad. Ms. Awosika-Olumo, a resident of Houston, Texas, will utilize her scholarship to study at the University of Birmingham in England.

Award recipients are chosen by a competitive selection process and must use the award to defray eligible study or intern abroad costs. These costs include program tuition, room and board, books, local transportation, insurance and international airfare.

The Gilman Scholarship is a congressionally-funded program sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and is administered by the Institute of International Education through its office in Houston. Named after retired congressman Benjamin A. Gilman from New York, the program was established by the International Academic Opportunity Act of 2000.

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