Babak Falsafi is a 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. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

. 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 trans ...

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 or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...

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 (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

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

References

Fellow Members of the IEEE Living people University at Buffalo alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni Year of birth missing (living people) American electrical engineers {{US-electrical-engineer-stub