Reetuparna Das receives NSF CAREER Award to develop in-situ compute memories

Assistant Professor Reetuparna Das has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant for her research project, “In-Situ Compute Memories for Accelerating Data Parallel Applications.”

It is predicted that by the year 2020, data production from individuals and corporations is expected to grow to 73.5 zetabytes, a 4.4× increase from the year 2015. This will require a large amount of time and energy in moving data from storage to compute units. Das’ research seeks to design specialized data-centric computing systems that dramatically reduce these overheads.

The central vision of this research is to create in-situ compute memories, which re-purpose the elements used in these storage structures and transform them into active computational units. In-situ compute memories enables computation in-place within each memory array, without transferring the data in or out of it. Such a transformation could unlock massive data-parallel compute capabilities, and reduce energy spent in data movement through various levels of memory hierarchy, thereby directly address the needs of data-centric applications.

More information about the project is available in Prof. Das’ CAREER Award Posting by NSF.

Prof. Das received her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, University Park in 2010 and joined the faculty of CSE at the University of Michigan in January 2016. Prior to this she was research scientist at Intel Labs and researcher-in-residence for Center for Future Architectures Research (C-FAR). Her research interests include computer architecture and its interaction with software systems and device/VLSI technologies. Some of her recent projects include energy proportional interconnect architectures, fine-grain heterogeneous core architectures for mobile systems, and low-power scalable interconnects for kilo-core processors. Her thesis research, focused on application-aware on-chip interconnects was recognized by an IEEE Top Picks award. She has received outstanding research and teaching assistantship awards from the Computer Science and Engineering department at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Das has authored over 45 articles in peer reviewed journals and conferences, and filed 5 patents through ARM Inc.

About the NSF CAREER Award

The CAREER grant is one of the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards, conferred for “the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.”