PDL People

Nathan Beckmann

Contact:	www |
Office: Phone: Fax: Admin:	GHC 9201 (412) 268-5573 ,(412) 268-5483
Mailing Address:	School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
Position: Projects:	Assistant Professor

Research Interests:

I work in computer architecture, with experience in distributed operating systems. Currently I'm focused on reducing data movement in multicores, which takes over half of energy in current chips, by redesigning caches so they dynamically adopt an application-specific organization.

My PhD thesis, "Design and Analysis of Spatially-Partitioned Shared Caches," received the 2015 Sprowls Doctoral Thesis Prize for the "best PhD thesis in computer science at MIT". This work exposes physical cache banks to software, letting the operating system schedule applications' working sets in nearby cache banks. This work spans cache partitioning, dynamic NUCA, heterogeneous memories, replacement policies, etc to reduce overall data movement. A common theme is the use of analytical models in software to control simple, efficient, but "dumb" hardware. This analytical approach yields robust performance and unexpected insights.