Trevor Mudge Bredt Family Professor Emeritus of Engineering –101010

 

Short Biography

Trevor Mudge received an MS and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is the Bredt Family Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of numerous papers on computer architecture, programming languages, VLSI design, and computer vision. He has chaired 58 theses in these areas. In 2014 he received the ACM/IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award (slides) and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and a member of the IET and the British Computer Society. He is a member of the Hall of Fame for the following conference: ISCA, Micro, and ASPLOS.

Wikipage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Mudge


Computer Architecture and Design

Most of my research and teaching focusses on computer architecture and related areas.

Shown Above is a 128-core multiprocessor, Centip3De, that was designed and built by our group at Michigan in 2010. It is remarkable in that it stacks seven silicon dies on top of one another. Four of the die contain the 128 (64 each) cores with their caches, two of the die are DRAM memory and the seventh die contains sense amps and spreader to the package pins.

The Six Ideas in Computer Architecture 

Surprisingly, there are only six distinct concepts used to design computers, apart from technology advances,  that reappear in many guises  over and over again: 
  1. Locality – spatial & temporal, e.g. caches
  2. Prediction – no state change, e.g. branch prediction
  3. Speculation – state change, e.g. prefetching
  4. Indirection, e.g. virtualization
  5. Parallelism, e.g. pipelining, OoO, vectors
  6. Specialization, e.g. GPUs, accelerators

A quote for the age of COVID

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cutural life, nutured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. ”  Isaac Asimov


Quotes

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”  Churchill—good prediction from an unlikely source 

“Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.” attributed to Herb Stein (c. 1985)—the end of Moore’s Law?

“We cannot justify our assumptions about the future based on past experience unless there is a law that the future will always resemble the past. No such law exists.” Paraphrasing David Hume—I think this was one of the most interesting insights in the past 500 years

“I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, ‘And the sun stood still… and hasted not to go down about a whole day’ (Joshua x. 13) and ‘He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time’ (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”  Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“Yeah? Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” The Dude—one of the best lines in modern cinema from the Big Lebowski