IST Lunch Bunch

Traditionally, the design of integrated systems has focused on the computational aspects of the problem at hand. However, as the number of components on a single chip and their performance continue to increase, the design of the communication architecture plays an increasingly important role in defining the performance and energy consumption of the overall system. In this talk, we plan to address the concept of "network" in a variety of contexts and identify specific design principles and optimization techniques that can be used to design, control, and optimize the next generation of massively parallel multicore systems. This new vision is based on rigorous developments in statistical physics and dynamical systems theory that allow us to model the network as a thermodynamical system. This new modeling paradigm helps not only capturing the intrinsic interactions among various network components, but also developing powerful techniques for resource allocation and management. Finally, we plan to go beyond multicore systems design and discuss how the science of network design can be applied to new areas of research such as cyber-physical and biological systems.