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ABSTRACT @ CMU

The ABSTRACT research group at CMU is the research group of Brandon Lucia. Our group does research at the intersection of computer architecture, computer systems, and programming languages. Our research focuses on improving the programmability, reliability, and efficiency of computing devices and systems. Our work cuts across the layers of the system stack, from the microarchitecture to the application, often touching on everything in between.


Research

Our research focuses on three main themes, ecompassing (1) Intermittent and Energy-harvesting computing, (2) Concurrency and Parallelism, and (3) Heterogeneous and Emerging Computer Architectures.

Intermittent and Energy-harvesting Computing Devices

We are working to define the system stack for intermittent computing devices, like ones that harvest energy from their environment. Our goal is to make these devices programmable, reliable, low-power, and robust to common-case power failures. Making these devices useful requires us to rethink the whole system stack to deal with complexity and reliability, from programming abstractions tolerant of interruptions, down to super-energy-efficient circuits we use to implement microarchitectural features tolerant of byzantine failures.

Concurrency and Parallelism

We are working to develop software techniques and hardware architectural features to make concurrent and parallel computer systems and software correct, reliable, and efficient. We research new architectural features that make programming easier, hardware software solutions to making debugging automatic, and architecture, compiler, and runtime gadgets that automatically avoid failures in broken programs. Our work leverages statistical inference, symbolic execution, and lightweight dynamic analysis in novel ways to make systems behave better.

Taming Heterogeneous Computing

We are working to map the design space of programmability, performance and generality on the increasingly important heterogeneous computing systems, like ones with a mixture of CPUs, GPUs FPGA, CGRAs, and ASICs. One of our goals is to define an efficient, implementable, comprehensible memory model and programming abstraction for such systems. To solve this problem, we need reconcile the differences of these devices with unifying architectural abstractions, hardware/software compilation and synthesis, and programming techniques that accommodate the breadth of features, precision levels, and efficiencies available.

People

Faculty

Brandon Lucia

PhD Students

Alexei Colin

Nuno Machado (summer 2015 Visiting Scholar, from IST Lisboa)

Masters Students

Dhruva Tirumala

Undergraduates

Mark McElwaine

Graham Harvey (now an Imagineer @ Disney)

High School Interns

Savi Medlang

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