Cider Seminar

WHAT IS CIDER, for the impatient reader: You spend an hour of your time while getting informed about recent developments in hot areas of Computer Engineering. You get to know your peers and of their work. Occasionally, you present your own work and get valuable feedback (think of it, it's a good bargain: you get many "experts" to comment on your work for free).

WHAT IS CIDER, In more detail: A long tradition in our University, the Cider/Computer Engineering seminar is a *weekly* gathering of students and faculty interested in all aspects of Computer Engineering. The seminar's objectives are not only to familiarize attendees with recent research developments in computer engineering and to ongoing research at Toronto, but also to expose students to valuable presentation techniques and informal peer review.

Speakers may chose to present their own research or recent publications from computer engineering conferences or related fields. Speakers summarize the research contributions and key concepts while audience is encouraged to actively participate by commenting on the ideas and value of the presented work. Students interested in all aspects of Computer Engineering are strongly encouraged to attend and present.

Comments? Need to schedule a seminar? Contact Kostas (pagiamt [at] eecg [dot] toronto [dot] edu), Paul (kundarew [at] eecg [dot] toronto [dot] edu) or Andreas (moshovos [at] eecg [dot] toronto [dot] edu), or send some mail to cideradm [at] eecg [dot] toronto [dot] edu

Presentations of on-going research work at Toronto are **strongly** encouraged. Presentations on recent research developments in all aspects of Computer Engineering are also encouraged.

THIS WEEK:

Rethinking Server Architecture Under Power Constraints

After several decades of research and development in computer architecture much of our expertise lies in designing for performance while taking cost and complexity into consideration. Recently however, power dissipation is becoming an increasingly important consideration. It doesn't take much to understand why reducing power dissipation in mobile applications (e.g., PDAs, laptops, phones, etc.). In this talk, we argue that power dissipation is also becoming important if not critical for desktop applications and in particular for servers. We also propose a simple, yet novel technique, snoop-filtering that can reduce power dissipation in SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) servers. SMP servers are quite an important class of systems as they are typically used to support many computing services we take for granted such as file, web and database services.