Chairholders

Profile

Vaughn Betz

The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Toronto

Chair title

NSERC/Intel Industrial Research Chair in Programmable Silicon

Chair program

Industrial Research Chairs program

Role

Associate Chairholder since 2011

Summary

The ability to fabricate ever more transistors on a semiconductor chip has enabled more computation, transforming society with ubiquitous communications, advanced medical imaging, on-demand entertainment delivery and more. These new applications and societal benefits have been driven by the exponential drop in the cost and energy of computation over time, but this trend is under threat as energy per computation no longer decreases sufficiently with improved manufacturing of conventional processors (CPUs). There is an alternative: configuring specialized hardware into Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips instead of controlling a general CPU with software instructions, reducing energy over ten-fold for many computations.

However, FPGAs face their own challenges. First, it is more difficult to design an application to run on an FPGA than on a CPU. As well, as improved manufacturing continually increases the capacity of FPGAs, it is becoming very time-consuming to complete designs that fully utilize them. Second, computation is increasingly moving from special-purpose systems such as cell phone base stations, which often employ FPGAs, to centralized data centers, which today almost exclusively use CPUs. Moving computation to data centers enables centralized administration and hardware sharing, but data centers consume tremendous amounts of power (~2% of US electricity demand). They could greatly benefit from the energy-efficiency of FPGAs, but the difficulties of FPGA application design and of sharing between applications have limited FPGA use in data centers.

The goal of this NSERC IRC program is to join forces between the University of Toronto and Intel, a leading FPGA vendor with which the university has a longstanding relationship. In the first term of the chair, the research team developed new computer-aided design software tools to investigate how best to optimize FPGA chips, and leveraged these tools to show that incorporating new hardware structures such as Networks-on-Chip can improve FPGA efficiency. The research team also showed that important computations, such as those needed to optimize light-activated chemotherapy, could be greatly accelerated with FPGAs.  Going forward, the IRC researchers and Intel will develop new FPGA hardware and software tools to implement designs. These will make FPGAs still more energy-efficient and more suitable to data centers, as well as create an easier design platform. By making data centers more power-efficient and capable, we hope to simultaneously enable new medical and societal applications for computation, while reducing environmental impact. This research will also place Canada and Intel at the forefront of more efficient computation development, providing economic benefits and making Intel’s large and growing Toronto Technology Centre a natural location to commercialize and exploit the results.

Partner

• Intel Corporation

Contact information

The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Toronto

Email: vaughn@eecg.utoronto.ca

Website:
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~vaughn