Babak Falsafi is a Swiss computer scientist specializing in computer architecture and digital platform design. He is the founding director of EcoCloud at EPFL, an industrial/academic consortium investigating efficient and intelligent data-centric technologies. He is a professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. Prior to that he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

, and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science, a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering (both summa cum laude) with distinctions from SUNY Buffalo, and a master's degree and PhD in computer science from University Wisconsin - Madison. He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a server architecture which laid the foundation for Sun Microsystems' NUMA machines, technologies to minimize (leakage) power in the memory system in the absence of activity (Supply Gating) and in shared memory (Snoop Filtering) prevalent in modern CPUs and multi-socket servers, and memory system accelerators in modern (ARM) CPUs in mobile platforms. He has shown that hardware memory consistency models are neither necessary (in the 90's) nor sufficient (a decade later) to achieve high performance in multiprocessor systems. These results eventually led to fence speculation in modern (x86) CPUs. He argued and demonstrated that the slowdown in silicon efficiency (Dennard's Law) and density scaling (Moore's Law) would lead to

Dark Silicon In the electronics industry, dark silicon is the amount of circuitry of an integrated circuit that cannot be powered-on at the nominal operating voltage for a given thermal design power (TDP) constraint. Dennard scaling would posit that as transi ...

and specialization in servers. These results led to a follow-on study on careful characterization of scale-out workloads on server platforms which laid the foundation for the first generation of Cavium ARM server CPUs, ThunderX. He is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, was named an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

in 2015 ''for contributions to multiprocessor and memory architecture design and evaluation'' and a

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

(IEEE) in 2012 ''for contributions to multiprocessor architecture and memory systems''.

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Academic staff of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne American electrical engineers Carnegie Mellon University faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the IEEE Purdue University faculty Swiss computer scientists University at Buffalo alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni {{US-electrical-engineer-stub