Falsafi, Babak Prof. Dr.

Parallel Systems Architecture Laboratory
Professor, Director of EcoCloud

EPFL IC ISIM PARSA; INJ 233 (Bâtiment INJ)
Station 14
CH-1015 Lausanne

Tel.: [+41 21 69] 35592,31393
babak.falsafi@epfl.ch

BIOGRAPHY

Babak Falsafi is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL, and an Adjunct Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. He is the founding director of the EcoCloud research center at EPFL innovating future energy-efficient and environmentally friendly cloud technologies. He also directs the Parallel Systems Architecture Lab (PARSA) at EPFL, and led the Microarchitecture thrust in the FCRP Center for Circuit and System Solutions (C2S2) from 2006 to 2010. His research targets technology-scalable datacenters, design for dark silicon, architectural support for software and hardware robustness, and analytic and simulation tools for computer system performance evaluation. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2000, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards in 2001, 2003 and 2004, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2004. He is a senior member of ACM and a fellow of IEEE.

RESEARCH

Babak’s research and educational activities primarily center around architectural innovation to address four emerging challenges in the design and performance-scalability of future computer systems: (1) the “programming wall”, due to the emergence of multiprocessor chips as the hardware pillars for future IT infrastructure and the lack of commodity parallel software, (2) the “memory wall”, due to the ever-growing gap between processor and memory performance, (3) the “technology wall”, due to the exponential increase in system power consumption and the dramatic reduction in circuit reliability and testability in emerging CMOS fabrication processes, and (4) the “simulation wall”, due to the increase in hardware and software complexity necessitating detailed modeling and representative measurement. He investigates techniques to address these challenges in the context of the following projects:

CloudSuite: A Benchmark Suite for Emerging Scale-Out Workloads
EuroCloud: Energy-scalable Datacenter Server Chips
LBA: Architectural Support for Security, Reliability and Performance Monitoring
SimFlex/ProtoFlex: Fast, Full-System Scalable Multiprocessor Simulation/Emulation
STeMS: Spatio-Temporal Memory Streaming
TRUSS: Scalable Non-Stop Servers
VISA: Server Chip Design on Dark Silicon

SKILLS

Computer architecture, multiprocessor architecture, memory systems, architectural support for gigascale integration, design evaluation tools

EcoCloud: innovating, economical and environment-friendly ICT