Energy-Modulated Computing: Capacitors, Causality, Concurrency...

Prof Alex Yakovlev, Newcastle University
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/eee/staff/profile/alex.yakovlev

For years people have been designing electronic and computing systems focusing on improving performance but only "keeping power and energy consumption in mind". This is a way to design energy-aware or power-efficient systems where energy is considered as a resource whose utilization must be optimized in the realm of performance constraints.

Increasingly, energy and power turn from optimization criteria into constraints, sometimes as critical as, for example, reliability and timing. Furthermore, quanta of energy or specific levels of power can shape the system's action. In other words, the system's behaviour, i.e. the way how computation and communication is carried out, can be determined or modulated by the flow of energy into the system. This view becomes dominant when energy is harvested from the environment or strictly rationed if it comes from internal sources. This view is also analogous to what happens in biological systems.

In this talk we look at the energy-modulated computing paradigm and illustrate its manifestations in system design, such as:

    * Converting electric charge into causality and self-timed operation
    * Using concurrency for best energy utilisation
    * Models for designing energy-proportional computers (resources, modes, order graphs, partial orders)

The talk will hopefully be motivating to a wide range of audience, including electronic and computer engineers interested in physical and mathematical aspects of (concurrent) computations.


Biography. Alexandre (Alex) Yakovlev was born in 1956 in Russia. He received D.Sc. from Newcastle University in 2006, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from St. Petersburg Electrical Engineering Institute in 1979 and 1982 respectively, where he worked in the area of asynchronous and concurrent systems since 1980, and in the period between 1982 and 1990 held positions of assistant and associate professor at the Computing Science department. Since 1991 he has been at the Newcastle University, where he worked as a lecturer, reader and professor at the Computing Science department until 2002, and is now heading the MicroSystems research group (http://async.org.uk) at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. His interests and publications are in the field of modelling and design of asynchronous, concurrent, real-time and real-power circuits and systems. He has published six monographs and more than 350 papers in academic journals and conferences, has managed over 30 research contracts and supervised over 40 PhD students. He has been a general chair and PC chair of several international conferences, including the IEEE Int. Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC), Petri nets (ICATPN), Application of Concurrency to Systems Design (ACSD), Network on Chip Symposium (NOCS), and  has been a chairman of the Steering committee of the ACSD conference for the last 15 years. In 2011-2013 he was a Dream Fellow of EPSRC, UK, to investigate different aspects of energy-modulated computing.