Wednesday Dec 10, 2025
Ep 22: Measuring Datacenter Efficiency and Visioning the Future of Computer Architecture with Dr. Babak Falsafi, EPFL
Dr. Babak Falsafi is a Professor at EPFL, the founding president of the Swiss Data Center Efficiency Association, and the founder of EcoCloud, an academic consortium focused on sustainable IT. His contributions to computer architecture include the invention of spatial and temporal memory streaming (SMS prefetchers) found in ARM cores and laying the groundwork for fence speculation by defining memory ordering requirements in modern CPUs. He is a key figure in cloud-native server design, with his work forming the foundation for the first-generation Cavium ARM server CPUs. He is a former chair of the SIGARCH Executive Committee, a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.
4 months ago
Sheesh! The formatting is gone. WTF!? . I’m working on an extremely power-efficient processor. It is based on Carver Mead’s work. It is called ”the Bittally processor”.
4 months ago
I worked with Babak F. at the U. of Wisconsin back in 1996. I did a class project, moving Berkeley Split-C from the Berkeley software environment to the CS Department at the . environment. The Berkeley people told Babak that it may not be possible. It took me two months to rebuild the build system. I then spent two days moving Split-C from shared memory to distributed memory. The experimental results were entirely uninteresting because the round-trip overhead of retrieving data from a separate node on the machine dominated all the timings. Today, the RTTs are smaller in many cases. For multiple nodes on a single silicon ”chip,” for example, the connections are much shorter. I’m an electronics engineer (licensed) and a computer scientist. I have been looking for work for six (6) years. Cheers! [coffee emoji] Todd Bezenek . I speak American English and Latin. Working on Greek. My wife is an anthropologist. P.. Spoiler. Babak is no longer legally married (I’ve been told.) Sorry, Babak.