Light up Computing Systems

Computing systems, from HPC and data center to automobile, aircraft, and
cellphone, are integrating growing numbers of processors, accelerators,
memories, and peripherals to meet the burgeoning performance
requirements of new applications under tight cost, energy, thermal,
space, and weight constraints. Recent advances in photonics technologies
promise ultra-high bandwidth, low latency, and great energy efficiency
to alleviate the inter/intra-rack, inter/intra-board, and
inter/intra-chip communication bottlenecks in computing systems. Silicon
photonics technologies piggyback onto developed silicon fabrication
processes to provide viable and cost-effective solutions. A large number
of silicon photonics devices and circuits have been demonstrated in
CMOS-compatible fabrication processes. Silicon photonics technologies
open up new opportunities for applications, architectures, design
techniques, and design automation tools to fully explore new approaches
and address the challenges of next-generation computing systems. This
talk will discuss the opportunities and challenges of photonics
technology in computing systems and present our recent findings.
Jiang Xu received his PhD from Princeton University. He worked at Bell
Labs, NEC Labs, and a startup company before joining the Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology. Jiang established Big Data System
Lab, Xilinx-HKUST Joint Lab, and OPTICS Lab at HKUST. He currently
serves as the Associate Editor for IEEE TCAD, TVLSI, and ACM TECS. He
served on the steering committees, organizing committees, and technical
program committees of many international conferences, including DAC,
DATE, ICCAD, CASES, ICCD, CODES+ISSS, NOCS, HiPEAC, ASP-DAC, etc. Jiang
is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer and was an ACM Distinguished Speaker.
He authored and coauthored more than 100 book chapters and papers in
peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. His research areas
include big data system, heterogeneous computing, optical
interconnection network, power delivery and management, MPSoC, low-power
embedded system, hardware/software codesign.