Carnegie Mellon’s Onur Mutlu Receives Outstanding Career Award from the National Science Foundation for Creating Scalable and Robust Multi-Core Memory Systems

May 11, 2010

Contact: Chriss Swaney
Carnegie Mellon University
412.268.5776

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University's Onur Mutlu received a five-year, $549,306 grant from the National Science Foundation to research techniques and algorithms for creating scalable, high-performance, and quality-of-service-aware memory systems for multi-core processors.

              
Mutlu's research group, SAFARI, is researching novel and efficient hardware/software techniques to overcome fundamental performance, security, robustness, reliability and efficiency challenges in current and future computer systems.

            
"The goal of our supported research is to develop predictable and controllable, yet at the same time, higher performance systems. Multi-core systems are everywhere in our daily lives, including office, mobile, cloud, sensor, and high-performance computing applications that drive productivity and innovation.  On these systems with shared hardware resources, we need to ensure that different applications or users on the system sharing the resources achieve the service quality and performance they need. Such guarantees on service quality are not available in existing systems, because the shared memory system is a large bottleneck and its design is vulnerable to denial of service attacks. Our research aims to change this, and to design multi-core systems we can count on, hopefully making our lives better and more productive," said Mutlu, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon. 

"This a wonderful award for such an outstanding young researcher," said Ed Schlesinger, the David Edward Schramm Memorial Professor and head of Carnegie Mellon's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. "The economic vitality of our nation depends on secure and robust computer systems, and we have the talent and the commitment to make our important cyber highways safer and more efficient."

Mutlu received bachelor's degrees in computer engineering and psychology in 2000 from the University of Michigan, and a master's in 2002 and Ph.D. in 2006 in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to Carnegie Mellon, he worked at Microsoft Research, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices.