Abstract

Multicore technology plays a pivotal role for conquering key societal challenges. Safe, ecological mobility, wide-spread rollout of e-health, smart industrial automation and the development of a secure, high-bandwidth, low-latency mobile communication infrastructure, all these cyber physical application domains critically depend on high-performance, low power and dependable computing. However, the complexity of such distributed computing platforms is a key challenge for their effective deployment.

Factories, as an example of large-scale manmade constructs, manage production complexity by a flexible, demand-driven distribution of objectives, materials and utilities in a hierarchical top-down manner to individual production units. This talk will introduce the idea of an Information Processing Factory (IPF) as a step towards autonomous many-core platforms in Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things. It represents a paradigm shift in platform design moving long term, robust and interdependent system operation in the focus of platform design rather than existing component-centric semiconductor or software technology, where design is focused on HW/SW component properties. Such a refocus is not only needed to prepare for growing hardware problems towards the end of Moore’s Law, but is a necessity to manage complexity when networked IT systems not only by far outnumber the human population in quantity but when their complexity exceeds human perception. The main objective is to synergistically merge the situational flexibility of self-aware/self-organizing emergence with the predictability of hierarchical top-down control in a holistic multi-layer approach, resembling an Information Processing Factory.

The IPF concept represents ongoing joint work by UC Irvine, TU Braunschweig and TU Munich in which we combine our past projects experience with self-awareness and self-organization at hardware and software layers of cyber physical multicore platforms.

Biography

Andreas Herkersdorf is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and also adjunct to the Department of Informatics at Technical University of Munich (TUM). He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree from TUM in 1987 and the Dr. degree from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1991, both in electrical engineering. Between 1988 and 2003, he has been in technical and management positions with the IBM Research Laboratory in Rueschlikon, Switzerland.

Since 2003, Dr. Herkersdorf is director of the Chair for Integrated Systems at TUM. He is a senior member of the IEEE, member of the DFG (German Research Foundation) Review Board and serves as editor for Springer and Elsevier journals for design automation and communications electronics. His research interests include application-specific multi-processor architectures, IP network processing, Network on Chip, system level SoC modeling and design space exploration methods, and self-adaptive fault-tolerant computing.