Christoph Hagleitner

IBM, Switzerland

The Future of Computing Systems for AI & HPC: Applications & Architecture

Abstract

Many recent breakthroughs in AI and science were only possible due to the availability of ever-more powerful computing systems. The architecture of the systems used to run classic HPC applications at exascale and the systems training trillion-parameter AI models is converging, but the explosion of the amounts of data, the power & energy limitations, the slow-down of Moore’s law, and the operational complexity (including security, data management, development environment, etc) need to be addressed. This demands a fresh look at system architecture, where data takes the center stage and defines key architectural elements in a data-driven approach. As a result, we propose a system architecture that combines a data and service oriented core with high-performance, energy efficient, domain-specific compute HW, which gets integrated, e.g., as chiplets into the overall system. The increased complexity of these system also requires a co-design approach, where the programming environment (languages, compilers, run-time components) is developed and adopted together with the new technologies.

Biography

Christoph Hagleitner leads the “Heterogeneous Cognitive Computing Systems” group at the IBM Research –Zurich Lab (ZRL) in Ruschlikon, Switzerland. The group focuses on heterogeneous computing systems for cloud datacenters and HPC. Applications include security, big-data analytics and cognitive computing. He obtained a diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH, Zurich, Switzerland in 1997 and a Ph.D. degree for a thesis on CMOS-integrated Microsensors from ETH, Zurich, Switzerland in 2002. In 2003 he joined IBM Research to work on the system architecture of a novel probe-storage device (“millipede”-project). In 2008, he started to build up a new research group in the area of accelerator technologies. The team initially focused on on-chip accelerator cores and gradually expanded its research to heterogeneous systems and their applications.