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PDL Talk Series

June 22, 2023


TIME: 12:00 noon - to approximately 2:00 pm EDT
PLACE: Virtual - a zoom link will be emailed closer to the seminar


SPEAKER: Daniel Berger
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Azure

Datacenter Sustainability Meets the Compute Express Link (CXL): A match made in heaven!
Cloud providers seek to reduce their carbon emission and other impacts on the environment. In recent years, DRAM has emerged as a major challenge. Fortunately, at the same time the industry has identified the Compute Express Link (CXL) as a common standard to increase memory sustainability, efficiency, and performance. CXL enables cloud providers to break the tight coupling of memory from compute resources, both in terms of media types and in terms of a physical connection. For example, CXL enables disaggregation on Intel, AMD, and ARM-based systems, which in turn can reduce resource wastage due to fragmentation. However, the design space of CXL-based memory systems is large. CXL also requires navigating complex design constraints around performance, virtualization, and management. This talk discusses why cloud providers are working to deploy CXL, key design constraints, and observations in designing towards practical deployment.

BIO: Daniel is a Senior Researcher at Azure Systems Research and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Washington. His research focuses in improving the efficiency, sustainability, and reliability of cloud platforms. He previously was a member for the Systems Research group at Microsoft Research and before that taught distributed systems at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of the 2018 Mark Stehlik Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University, a 2014 ACM WiSec Paper Award, the 2014 IFIP Performance Best Paper Award, the 2021 ACM SOSP Best Paper Award, and an ACM ASPLOS 2023 distinguished paper award.


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