Xian-He Sun Gives Keynote Speech at INFOSCALE09 in Hong Kong
Xian-He Sun, professor of computer science and director of IIT's Scalable Computing Software Laboratory, gave the keynote speech Reevaluating Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era at INFOSCALE09 on June 10 in Hong Kong.
Multicore architecture, or architecture having a processing system with two or more cores or CPUs, is now the norm. But there are questions about if and when we should scale up the number of cores to hundreds or more and enter the "many-core" era. In his speech Dr. Sun noted that major vendors are reluctant to do this so far because of Amdahl's law - having to do with what maximum improvements can be expected to a whole system when part of it is improved -- and the "memory wall," i.e., the gap between CPU speed and memory outside of the CPU chip.
Sun used the same hardware cost model of multicore chips used by Mark Hill and Michael Marty, who developed the multicore Amdahl's law theory, to introduce two performance models from the scalable computing point of view. He found that there is no inherent, immovable upper bound on the scalability of multicore architecture. Sun concluded with proposed solutions to the memory-wall problem to make the potential scalability of multicore reachable in practice.
INFOSCALE is the International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, held by the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICTS), a global research society.
Dr. Sun also is a guest faculty member in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division and Computing Division at Argonne and Fermi laboratories. Before joining IIT in 1999, he worked at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University; the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE) at NASA Langley Research Center; and Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; and he was an American Society For Engineering Education (ASEE) fellow at Navy Research Laboratories. Dr. Sun's research interests include parallel and distributed processing, high-end computing, software systems, and performance evaluation.
Dr. Sun has published over 150 research articles and has 10 granted and pending U.S. and international patents, and his research is supported by NSF and other U.S. government agencies. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM, a member of Phi Kappa Phi, an editor of five international professional journals, president of the Society of Chinese-American Professors & Scientists, and more.
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