Sarita Adve

Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993

Research Statement

Professor Adve's research focus is computer architecture. There are two important emerging trends influencing computer architecture today. First, there has begun a shift in the applications that drive both the highest volume and the highest performance computers, with commercial data processing and media processing applications being the key drivers. Second, current architectural techniques are reaching their limits in complexity and performance. Advances in semiconductor technology, however, offer exciting opportunities for innovation - the possibility of a billion transistors on a chip and system-on-a-chip technologies augur radically different architectures. Professor Adve's goal is to develop architectural techniques that exploit emerging semiconductor technologies to provide the orders-of-magnitude improvements needed to enable applications that seem futuristic today. Specific ongoing projects include designing flexible memory hierarchies and processors that adapt to the application, understanding new application domains such as third generation wireless systems, exploiting merged DRAM-logic chips, exploiting instruction-level parallelism, and developing new evaluation techniques. Past work has also included cache coherence protocols and memory consistency models for shared-memory multiprocessors. Professor Adve's group has developed the RSIM simulator which is widely used for research and education.

In the News