BREAKING THE BOUNDARIES IN COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

In the past decade, advances in non-volatile memory technologies significantly improve the capabilities of storage devices. However, modern computer architectures, including accelerator based, heterogeneous computers, still inherit the entrenched boundaries among components. These boundaries lead to inefficiencies for executing applications, especially when the computer needs to deal with a huge volume of data.

To allow computers to make efficient use of modern NVM-based storage/memory devices and lead to performance improvements, we should break the boundaries in computer architectures. I propose three directions: 1) redefining the roles of architectural components 2) revisiting the interfaces and 3) removing unnecessary layers and local optimizations. I will demonstrate that by redefining the role of modern non-volatile memory-based storage devices, we can improve the performance of applications by 1.39x. By revisiting the storage device interface, we can not only remove redundant layers in computer systems, but also achieve a speedup of 2.5x for key-value store.

In addition to storage systems, the same philosophy also applies to a wider range of computer systems and applications. I will also share my recent research in improving latencies for virtual reality
systems.