Docentship lecture - Chang Hyan Park: "Going beyond main memory – An exciting industry proposal for attaching even more memory to your computer!"

The Department of Information Technology hereby invite all interested to a docentship lecture in subject Computer Science.

Chairperson: Professor Stefanos Kaxiras

Representative of the Docentship Committee: Professor Nataša Sladoje

Abstract: Computers use the main memory to hold data that is going to be processed. Of course, data can be stored in larger albeit slower storage devices (such as hard disks and solid-state drives, i.e. SSDs) but eventually the data needs to be moved into the main memory for the processor to compute on it. Naturally, the performance of the main memory and the capacity is both crucial for performance. Computing datasets have been constantly growing, and fortunately, the main memory manufacturing technology has been improving at a steady pace to try keep up with the increasing data. However, recently the improvements in memory manufacturing technology have slowed down-also known as ‘the end of Moore’s law’-and we can no longer expect the increase in main memory capacity as we experienced in the years past. The gap between the data and main memory will continue to increase and will result in performance impacts.

This lecture will survey the current landscape of computer memory and go into details on a new industry proposal, i.e. the Compute Express Link (CXL) and why it is promising. Then, the lecture will go into some research questions that I plan to work on regarding this promising technology.

The lecture is an obligatory teaching test for those applying for admittance as docent and it should be possible for students and others with basic academic education in the relevant field to follow it. The lecture lasts 40-45 minutes with subsequent discussion. The lecture will be given in English.

Welcome!