Title: Programming and System Support for Reliable Intermittent Computing
Date/time: Friday, Oct. 14 @ Noon
Location: 114 Gates Hall
Host: Profs. Christopher Batten and Adrian Sampson
Abstract: Emerging energy-harvesting devices (EHDs) are computer systems that operate using energy extracted from their environment, even from low-power sources like ambient radio-frequency energy. Future EHDs will be a key enabler of emerging implantable medical devices, IoT applications, and nano-satellites, but today’s EHDs operate intermittently, only as environmental energy is available. Unfortunately, intermittence makes today’s EHDs unreliable and extremely difficult to program and debug. In this talk I will summarize the main challenges of intermittent execution. I will then discuss our recent efforts developing system, programming language, and toolchain support for EHDs to address the challenges of intermittence, focusing especially on programmability, debugging, and reliability. I will close by discussing our recent work on building a reliable, EHD-based, hardware/software application platform for an upcoming deployment.
Bio: Brandon Lucia is an assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Brandon’s research focuses on redefining computer architectures and systems that make increasingly pervasive, often safety-critical, devices reliable, energy-efficient, and programmable. Brandon and his lab are currently focusing on defining the system stack for systems with intermittently available energy and resources, as well as on redefining parallel architectures to improve their efficiency, correctness, and reliability, exploiting heterogeneity and approximation. Brandon’s work targets the boundaries between computer architecture, compilers, system software, and programming languages. Brandon’s research group is supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, Intel, and Disney Research.
Brandon has received a Google Faculty Research Award, the Bell Labs Prize, an OOPSLA Distinguished Paper Award and an OOPSLA Distinguished Artifact Award, and Brandon was elected in 2016 to serve on DARPA’s Information Science And Technology (ISAT) study group. Before joining CMU, Brandon spent a year as a Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond. Brandon earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2013, and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Tufts University. Brandon’s personal website is http://brandonlucia.com, his research group is at http://abstract.ece.cmu.edu, and his band netcat is at http://netcat.co