// Keynote: Energy Implications of Transactional Memory for Embedded Architectures

In the same way that mobile devices are gradually usurping many of the functions of laptops, specialized high-end embedded systems are gradually displacing many general-purpose systems. Like their general-purpose counterparts, and for many of the same energy-related reasons, these embedded systems are turning to multicore architectures, presenting new challenges to both hardware and software designers. I will describe our group's research investigating how synchronization mechanisms affect the performance and energy-efficiency of embedded multicores. We find that in most cases, speculative synchronization mechanisms such as transactional memory or lock elision provides both significantly reduced energy consumption and increased throughput as compared to conventional locks and semaphores. Joint work with Iris Bahar and Tali Moreshet.

// Maurice Herlihy

has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab, and is currently a professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.