Keynote: The “Inevitable” Open Platform for Energy-Efficient, High-performance Computing

Prof. Luca Benini

Chair of digital circuits and systems at ETHZ, Full Professor at Universita’ di Bologna

Today’s data-parallel HPC, AI, Cloud workloads demand ever-growing performance under a constant power envelope. To address this fundamental challenge in a regime of diminishing returns from technology scaling, we must minimize overhead associated with data transfer, data-flow management, as well as instruction fetching, decoding, while introducing “controlled doses” of domain specialization. The last decade has seen the rise of open instruction sets, open architectures, and open hardware as key enablers for designing more efficient computing systems. In this talk, I will share insights gained in a decade of design “adventures” on open-source RISC-V hardware and software for energy-efficient computing, from baseline processing elements to high-performance many-core chiplet-based systems, and provide a personal view on the “inevitability” of RISC-V.

Luca Benini holds the chair of digital Circuits and systems at ETHZ and is Full Professor at the Universita’ di Bologna. He received a PhD from Stanford University. Dr. Benini’s research interests are in energy-efficient parallel computing systems, smart sensing micro-systems and machine learning hardware. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, of the ACM and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg award, the 2020 EDAA achievement Award, the 2020 ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Award and the 2023 IEEE CS Edward J. McCluskey award.