Seminar Series Archive

Using data compression methods in the memory hierarchy can improve the efficiency of memory systems by enabling higher effective cache capacity, more effective use of available memory bandwidth and by enabling higher effective main memory capacity. This can lead to substantially higher performance and lower power consumption. However, to enable these values requires highly effective compression algorithms that can be implemented with low latency and high throughput. Research at Chalmers University of Technology and at ZeroPoint Technologies, a fabless startup company, has yielded many new families of compression methods that are now being commercially deployed. This talk will present the major insights of more than a decade of research on memory compression methods for the memory hierarchy. The talk covers value-aware and statistical compression caches, compression algorithms that are tuned to the data at hand through data analysis using new clustering algorithms to allow for substantially higher memory bandwidth.

Per Stenstrom is a professor at Chalmers University of Technology. His research interests are in parallel computer architecture. He has authored or co-authored four textbooks, about 200 publications and twenty patents in this area. He has been program chairman of several top-tier IEEE and ACM conferences including IEEE/ACM Symposium on Computer Architecture and acts as Associate Editor of ACM TACO, Topical Editor IEEE Transaction on Computers and Associate Editor-in-Chief of JPDC. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and a member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering Science.