Faculty
Rakesh Kumar
Assistant Professor
208 Coordinated Science Lab, MC-228
1308 W. Main St.
Urbana, Illinois 61801
(217) 333-5955
Research Statement:
I lam interested in processors and systems with focus on a) scalability: ability to seamlessly exploit multiple levels of concurrency in workloads, b) adaptability: proactive adjustment to the intrinsic workload type and application requirements, and c) programmability: cooperative information exchange between hardware and software for productivity and efficiency.
Current research goal is to build a truly adaptable processor that can adapt to all workload conditions and characteristics, and can therefore deliver performance and power characteristics as if it were designed for close to the best case, on average, instead of the average case, at best. Another research goal is to study how to build and use many-core (hundreds of cores) processors. This involves studying both bottlenecks like interconnection and coherence, worse-case power, etc., as well as opportunities like enhancing reliability, availability, usability, etc. I am also interested in revisiting the roles of hardware and software in the computing stack, with special focus on mechanisms vs policies and what goes where (e.g., should process management and scheduling be done in hardware?).
The two specific projects that we are doing in my lab (Passat Group) are 1) 1) Hardware and system support for actor-oriented (or message passing) programming and execution, and 2) design and evaluation of stochastic processor (or processors that do not always compute correctly by design). More details on both these projects soon (send us an email if you want to know details of these two flagship projects).
Research Interests:
- Computer Architecture
- Programming/Computing Models
- Fault tolerance, reliability
Undergraduate Research Opportunities:
I am looking for motivated undergraduate students to join my group. Email rakeshk@uiuc.edu if you want to do research in computer architecture, reconfigurable computing, or hardware/software interface. See our research/publications pages (http://passat.crhc.uiuc.edu) for a sampling of our research. Please attach your CV as well.
For more information:
CRHC Home Page
Honors, Recognition, and Outstanding Achievements for Research
- Arnold O Beckman Research Award, 2009
- Creative Research Award, College of Fine and Applied Arts, 2008
- Intel Research Council Award, 2007, 2008
- UC San Diego CSE Dissertation Award, 2007
- IBM PhD Fellowship, 2005-2006