6/27/2023 Eleanor Wyllie
Three papers by Electrical & Computer Engineering professor and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar Rakesh Kumar were selected for the ISCA-50 Retrospective at the 2023 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) earlier this month. This is a significant recognition of Kumar’s long-term contributions to the field.
Written by Eleanor Wyllie
Three papers by Electrical & Computer Engineering professor and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar Rakesh Kumar were selected for the ISCA-50 Retrospective at the 2023 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) earlier this month. This is a significant recognition of Kumar’s long-term contributions to the field.
ISCA is widely regarded as the premier conference in computer architecture. To mark the fiftieth anniversary, this retrospective highlighted the most impactful papers from the last 25 years.
“It is very humbling to receive these test-of-time recognitions since they are an indicator that your work is valued 10, 20, 25 years later. This is a great opportunity to reflect on how my own work and the community’s work has evolved over time,” commented Kumar. “I feel very thankful to ECE Illinois for providing an environment that encourages risk-taking and impact and for the stellar colleagues that I continually learn from.”
The ISCA-50 Retrospective aims to paint a picture of how computer architecture research has progressed over the years, and Kumar’s papers illustrate the rapid developments in this field and the future potential of chip design.
His team’s ISCA 2004 paper “Single-ISA Heterogeneous Multi-Core Architectures for Multithreaded Workload Performance” demonstrated that the most efficient processors are those with both big, powerful cores and small, energy-efficient cores on the same chip. The idea of heterogeneous multi-cores was widely adopted by industry and academia. Today this concept drives the hardware behind most mobile phones and a large number of tablets, iPads, desktops and wearable devices.
The ISCA 2005 paper “Interconnections in Multi-Core Architectures: Understanding Mechanisms, Overheads, and Scaling” received a TCCA/SIGARCH ISCA Influential Paper Award in 2020. It has significantly impacted the chip design and implementation community, demonstrating the importance of interconnections between processor cores in designing multi-core chips.
The most recent paper to be included, Kumar’s ISCA 2020 paper “Printed Microprocessors,” explores chips that can be printed using a desktop printer. These chips promise much lower costs and can also conform to different shapes. “Although this work is too recent to talk about its impact, I think it was selected as an example of technology that can help move us beyond the limitations of silicon,” Kumar commented.
His research team is currently working on several projects in waferscale computing and flexible and printed computing, as well as some exciting new projects in the areas of in-space computing and immersive computing. One of the team’s immersive computing papers was also nominated for the Best Paper Award at this year’s ISCA. Kumar is also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory.