I
am an assistant professor in the Electrical
and Computer Engineering Department
at the University of Texas at Austin.
There I teach graduate and
undergraduate classes in computer architecture and parallel computer
architecture and lead a research group studying high-performance
computer
simulation techniques, future computer architectures, parallel
computing,
Internet router architecture and network processing.
My
group is
working on FPGA-Accelerated Simulation
Technologies (FAST), a
methodology to
build extremely fast,
cycle-accurate
full system simulators that run real applications on top of real
operating systems. We are currently
able to boot unmodified Windows XP , Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6 and run
unmodified applications on top of those operating systems at simulation
speeds in the
1.2MIPS range (between 100 and 1000 times faster than Intel's and AMD's
cycle-accurate simulators), which is fast enough to type into Microsoft
Word (click here to see a real-time video
of us
doing exactly that.) We believe we can achieve at least
5-10MIPS as our prototype matures.
I am also
working with several other faculty members and researchers at
Berkeley, CMU, Intel, MIT, Stanford and Washington on
the Research Accelerator for
Multiple
Processors (RAMP). The RAMP project is building a set of
components, including HDL descriptions of hardware components as well
as the necessary operating system ports and run-time system software,
to enable the construction of 1000 core machines on FPGA boards.
We expect that such infrastructure could dramatically accelerate the
ability for research groups to experiment with all aspects of parallel
systems.
My research
is supported by a Department of
Energy Early Faculty Career
Award, the National Science Foundation
including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, SRC, Intel,
Xilinx, IBM Faculty
Awards,
Freescale, and Altera.
Email:
derek
at ece
period
utexas period edu
Phone: 512.232.7722
Office: ENS Building, room 540
Snail mail: The University of Texas at Austin, 2501 Speedway, ENS
Building, room 540, C0803, Austin, TX 78712