
Christopher Batten
Professor
Computer Systems Laboratory
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
College of Engineering
Cornell University
office: 323 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853
phone: (607) 255-2672
email: cbatten cornell edu
I am a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a graduate field member of Computer Science at Cornell University. My research group is part of the Computer Systems Laboratory, and we largely work at the intersection of computer architecture, electronic design automation, and digital VLSI including projects on parallel programming frameworks, programmable accelerator design, interconnection networks, productive VLSI chip design methodologies, and architectures for future emerging technologies. Building prototype systems is an integral part of my research, as this is one of the best ways to validate assumptions, gain intuition about physical design issues, and provide platforms for future software research.
My research has been recognized with several awards including the ACM/IEEE MICRO Hall of Fame, a Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program award, an Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program award, an NSF CAREER award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and an IEEE Micro Top Picks selection. My teaching has been recognized with the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, two Michael Tien '72 Excellence in Teaching Awards, and a James M. and Marsha D. McCormick Award for Outstanding Advising of First-Year Engineering Students.
In 2018, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall in Cambridge, UK. Prior to joining Cornell University, I received my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2007 to 2009, I was a visiting scholar in the Parallel Computing Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley; I received an M.Phil. in Engineering as a Churchill Scholar at the University of Cambridge in 2000, and received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering as a Jefferson Scholar at the University of Virginia in 1999.
Recent News
- May 2022: Gave guest lecture in ENGRI 1210 The Computing Technology Inside Your Smartphone on Recent Trends in Computer Engineering
- Apr 2022: Paper on accelerating seed location filtering in DNA read mapping using a commercial compute-in-SRAM architecture (in collaboration with Dan Ilan at GSI Technologies) is accepted to the 5th Workshop on Accelerator Architecture in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (AACBB'23) to be held in conjunction with ISCA-50
- Mar 2023: Invited to present work on PyMTL3 at NVIDIA research
- Mar 2023: Courtney Golden was selected as a Merrill Presidential Scholar, which is awarded to the most outstanding graduating seniors at Cornell, and also earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship – Congratulations!
- Mar 2023: Peitian Pan presented our work on gradually typed hardware description languages at the Workshop on Languages, Tools, and Techniques for Accelerator Design (LATTE'23) in Vancouver, CA
- Mar 2023: Co-organized field trip for the Cornell Custom Silicon Systems (C2S2) team to visit the SUNY Poly Nanoscale Fabrication Facility in Albany, NY
- Feb 2023: Paper making the case for gradually typed hardware description languages is accepted to the Workshop on Languages, Tools, and Techniques for Accelerator Design (LATTE'23) to be held in conjunction with ASPLOS-28
- Feb 2023: Khalid Al-Hawaj presented our work on ephemeral vector engines at the 29th IEEE Int'l Symp. on High-Peformance Computer Architecture (HPCA'23) in Montreal, CA
- Feb 2023: Promoted to the rank of Full Professor by the Cornell University Board of Trustees
- Jan 2023: Paper on supporting dynamic task parallelism on manycore architectures with software-managed scratchpad memories (in collaboration with our colleagues at the University of Washington) accepted for publication in the ACM Int'l Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating System (ASPLOS'23)
- Jan 2023: Paper evaluating the CIFER system-on-chip (in collaboration with our colleagues at Princeton University) accepted for publication in the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conf. (CICC'23); CIFER is a 4x4mm 456M-transistor chip in GlobalFoundries 12nm which includes four RISC-V RV64GC Ariane cores (implemented using SystemVerilog), 18 RISC-V RV32IM tiny cores (implemented using PyMTL3), and an embedded FPGA (implemented using PRGA) interconnected through a heterogeneous cache coherent memory system.
- Jan 2023: Course website for ECE 5745 Complex Digital ASIC Design now online
- Dec 2022: Jack Brzozowski, Kyle Infantino, Dilan Lakhani, Angela Zou, and Lauren Shen completed their MEng design projects and graduated. Jack is heading to AMD; Kyle, Dilan, and Lauren are heading to Apple; and Angela is heading to Qualcomm – Congratulations!
- Dec 2022: Research group celebrated with an end-of-semester dinner
- Dec 2022: Co-advising the brand new Cornell Custom Silicon Systems (C2S2) project team. C2S2 is a student-led team of 25 diverse students including sophomores, juniors, and seniors organized into six subteams focusing on digital design and verification, analog design, software, system architecture, and project management. C2S2 is working hard towards their first tapeout on SkyWater 130nm this spring!
- Dec 2022: Article on Jack Brozozowski, Kyle Infantino, and Dilan Lakhani's MEng design project which involved designing, testing, fabricating, and testing a custom RISC-V microcontroller in TSMC 180nm published as an ECE spotlight news item
- Nov 2022: Lin Cheng successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled "Programming Frameworks for Improving the Productivity and Performance of Manycore Architectures". Lin is heading to Apple – Congratulations!
- Nov 2022: Organized a hands-on activity for 20 freshmen to introduce them to computer engineering by building an Internet-of-things motion-dector plus alarm system as part of the educational outreach initiatives funded through a National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant
- Oct 2022: Khalid Al-Hawaj successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled "Ephemeral Vector Engines". Khalid will be starting as an Assistant Professor at King Fahd University (KFUPM) – Congratulations!
- Oct 2022: Paper on ephemeral vector engines accepted to the 29th IEEE Int'l Symp. on High-Peformance Computer Architecture (HPCA'23)
- Oct 2022: Inducted into the ACM/IEEE Int'l Symp. on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Hall of Fame
- Oct 2022: Austin Rovinski co-organized a tutorial on using open-source EDA tools in computer architecture research held in conjunction with the 55th ACM/IEEE Int'l Symp. on Microarchitecture (MICRO'22) in Chicago, IL
- Oct 2022: Tuan Ta presented our work on big.VLITTLE, a new technique for on-demand data-parallel acceleration in moble systems-on-chip at the 55th ACM/IEEE Int'l Symp. on Microarchitecture (MICRO'22) in Chicago, IL
- Sep 2022: Invited to present our vision for a new era of open-source hardware, using our work on PyMTL3 as a case study, at the Cornell Computer Science Colloquium
- Sep 2022: Presented an overview of electrical and computer engineering to freshman advisees to explain why it is such an exciting time to study computer engineering
- Aug 2022: Invited to attend the virtual Google Accelerators, Compute, Reliability, Security Workshop to discuss research problems facing Google in the areas of computer systems
- Aug 2022: Course website for ECE 4750 Computer Architecture now online
- Jul 2022: Co-taught (with Adrian Sampson) a week-long computer systems hardware module for Cornell's Rising Sophomore Summer Program in Computer Science (CSMore) partially funded through the broader impact plan of our NSF Panorama grant. Students learned about digital logic, computer arithmetic, and simple processors through a series of lectures, in-class activities, and labs. By end of the week, students had incrementally developed a "Femto-Processor" from just basic logic gates in Logisim. The Femto-Processor supported two instructions (i.e., write immediate and add) and was capable of executing up to 16-instruction programs to do simple arithmetic and generate the Fibonancci sequence.
- Jul 2022: Paper on big.VLITTLE, a new technique for on-demand data-parallel acceleration in mobile systems-on-chip, accepted to the 55th ACM/IEEE Int'l Symp. on Microarchitecture (MICRO'22)
- Jul 2022: Organized a special session for the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conf. (DAC'22) on breaking down physical design barriers with open and agile flow tools; the session was chaired by Megan Wachs (SiFive) and included talks by Bora Nikolic (UC Berkeley) on Hammer, Christopher Torng (Stanford/USC) on mflowgen, and Andreas Olofsson (Zero ASIC) on silicon compiler with over 50 attendees
- Jun 2022 Participated in the NYDesign/efabless IC design workshop in Rome, NY to discuss the emerging open-source hardware design ecosystem in upstate New York
- Jun 2022: Taped out first teaching test chip for ECE 5745 Complex Digital ASIC Design on SkyWater 130nm through the efabless ChipIgnite program. The chip included four projects with 15 students participating: a CRC32 checksum unit implemented using C++ high-level synthesis via Mentor CatapultC, a latency insensitive synthesizable memory implemented in PyMTL3, a 2x2 systolic array multiplier implemented in SystemVerilog, and a greatest common divisor unit implemented in SystemVerilog. Each unit included its own dedicated SPI interface for isolated testing.
- Jun 2022: Presented our work on using Guix in computer architecture research at both the gem5 users' workshop and the 6th Workshop on Computer Archiecture Research with RISC-V (CARRV'22) in New York City, NY as part of our open-source software/hardware advocacy broader impact initiative funded through our NSF Panorama grant
- Jun 2022: Research group attended the 48th ACM/IEEE Int'l Symp. on Computer Architecture (ISCA'22) in New York City, NY
- Jun 2022: BRG alumnus Christopher Torng will be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California in January 2023
- Jun 2022: Attended the final DARPA IDEA/POSH wrap-up meeting in San Diego, CA (with our collaborator Prof. David Wentzlaff at Princeton University) where we presented program outcomes on open-source cache coherent memory systems, open-source synthesizable FPGA generators, open-source on-chip network generators, open-source RTL testing frameworks, and a recent test chip in GlobalFoundries 14nm that served to silicon validate this open-source IP
- All News
Teaching
- ECE 2400 Computer Systems Programming
- ECE 4750 Computer Architecture
- ECE 5745 Complex Digital ASIC Design
- ECE 5970 Special Topics: Chip-Level Interconnection Networks
Educational Outreach Activities
- CSMore: Week-Long Computer Systems Unit
- Curie Academy 2021: Week-Long Design Experience
- ENGRG 1050 Engineering Seminar: Computer Engineering Hands-On Experience
- ENGRG 1060 Explorations in Engineering: Computer Engineering Unit
- Curie Academy 2014: Week-Long Design Experience
Research Group
- Austin Rovinski (Postdoc)
- Tuan Ta (MS/PhD)
- Yanghui Ou (MS/PhD)
- Peitian Pan (MS/PhD)
- Nick Cebry (MS/PhD)
- Anya Prabowo (BS/MEng)
- Dhruv Sharma (MEng)
- Bryce Roth (MEng)
- Megha Shyam (MEng)
- Courtney Golden (BS)
- Aidan McNay (BS)
- Lily Yu (BS)
- Caroline Huang (BS)
- Angela Cui (BS)
- Evan Williams (BS)
- Crystal Shi (BS)
- Former Members
Research Sponsors
- National Science Foundation: PPoSS'21, SHF'20/'15, E2CDA'17, CRI'15/'11, XPS'13, EAGER'11, CAREER'12
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: PIPES'21, POSH'18, SDH'18, CRAFT'16, YFA'12
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research: YIP'15
- Semiconductor Research Corporation: JUMP'18, E2CDA'17
- Intel Corporation: research funding and equipment donation
- Facebook: research funding
- NVIDIA: research funding and equipment donation
- Xilinx: research funding and CAD tool donation
- Cornell Engineering Learning Initiatives: undergraduate research funding
- Advanced Micro Devices: undergraduate research funding
- Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor: CAD tool donation
- ARM: physical IP donation
- GitHub, TravisCI, Codecov.io: hosted software donations
Professional Activities
- Conference PC Chair: IEEE Micro TopPicks'23
- Conference PC Member: IEEE Micro TopPicks'22/'16, ISCA'22/'17/'15/'13, MICRO'20/'15
- Conference PC Member: SC'17/'16, HPCA'16, PPoPP'13, ASPLOS'11
- Conference External Reviewer: ISCA, ASPLOS, MICRO, HPCA, DAC, SIGMETRICS
- Conference Organizing Committee Member: HPCA'14
- Workshop PC Member: WDDD'16, GPGPU'16, NOPE'15, WDDD'15, GPGPU'14
- Workshop Co-Organizer: SIGARCH Visioning Workshop on Open and Agile HW Design, WARP'15, WINDS'10
- Tutorial Co-Organizer: PyMTL'19, PyMTL/Pydgin'15
- Associate Editor: IEEE Micro'20–22
- Journal Reviewer: IEEE Micro, CACM, JETCAS, TCAD, TVLSI, TACO, CAL, MICPRO, COMPUTER
- Book Reviewer: Morgan and Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture
- Member: IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIGARCH