Posted May 10, 2012 Atlanta, GA
Vincent J. Mooney received the Best Paper Award at the Architecture of Computing Systems 2012 Conference, held February 29-March 2 in Munich, Germany. He is an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Dr. Mooney’s paper entitled “Classification-based Improvement of Application Robustness and Quality of Service in Probabilistic Computer Systems” is based on collaboration among the coauthors who represent TU Dortmund (Germany), Nanyang Technical University (Singapore), Georgia Tech, and Rice University. Future semiconductors no longer guarantee permanent deterministic operation and are expected to show probabilistic behavior due to lowered voltages and shrinking structures. However, instructions handling control flow or pointers still require determinism. This paper is the first to identify these instructions and apply a transient error classification to probabilistic circuits considering voltage distributions, ensuring that probabilistic effects only affect unreliable operations that accept a certain level of impreciseness. To evaluate, this team analyzed the robustness and quality-of-service of an H.264 video decoder and mapped unreliable arithmetic operations onto probabilistic components of an ARM-based simulator, while remaining operations used deterministic components.
Dr. Mooney’s coauthors on this paper are Andreas Heinig (TUD), Florian Schmoll (TUD), Peter Marwedel (TUD), Krishna Palem (Rice and NTU), and Michael Engel (TUD). Dr. Mooney took part in this work while he was a visiting professor at the Institute of Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics at NTU Singapore.
About the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is one of eight schools and departments in the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. All ECE undergraduate and graduate programs are in the top 10 of the most recent college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. Over 2,500 students are enrolled in the School’s graduate and undergraduate programs, and in the last academic year, 723 degrees were awarded.
Over 110 ECE faculty members are involved in 11 areas of research, education, and commercialization – bioengineering, computer systems and software, digital signal processing, electric power, electromagnetics, electronic design and applications, microsystems, optics and photonics, systems and controls, telecommunications, and VLSI systems and digital design.
About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities and the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Business, and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
