Doug Burger: Computing at Planetary Scale

We are in a renaissance of computer architecture.  New applications domains such as AI are driving new architectures at ultra-large scale, and cloud+hybrid+edge computing are merging to form a virtual “planetary supercomputer”.   In this talk I will describe a number of Microsoft’s cutting-edge investments in its cloud, edge, and AI platforms, and will summarize some important challenges on which the research community could focus.

Dr. Doug Burger, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/dburger/, is one of the world’s leading active researchers in computer architecture, with a broad set of important contributions to his credit. After receiving his PhD from University of Wisconsin in 1998, he was a UT Austin professor for ten years. His work on Explicit Data Graph Computing (EDGE) represents the fourth major class of instruction-set architectures (after CISC, RISC, and VLIW). Doug joined Microsoft in 2008, believing that Microsoft is the right place to do amazing architecture work with huge impact. He co-founded and co-leads Project Catapult, which set the goal of designing the right post-CPU acceleration architecture for next-generation hyperscale clouds. This work produced the Configurable Cloud architecture, based on network-attached FPGAs, that is now is central to Microsoft’s cloud strategy. This project has enabled teams across Microsoft to drive major advances in artificial intelligence/deep learning, Bing ranking, cloud networking, storage efficiency, security, and large-scale service acceleration. His current group (Silicon Systems Futures) is highly interdisciplinary, working in areas as diverse as cloud acceleration, silicon architectures, mobile app ecosystem architecture, new optical devices, and machine learning. He has been recognized as an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow, and in 2006 received the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for his early contributions to the field. He is the co-inventor of more than fifty U.S. patents, including six with Bill Gates.

Coffee and cookies will be provided