Non-volatile memory technologies offer an interesting landscape for addressing critical challenges in power consumption and reliability in current system design. However, non-volatile memory technologies such as STT-RAM and Phase Change RAM (PCRAM) also suffer from concerns due to high write energies and latencies as well as endurance. This talk will focus on performance, energy and reliability enhancements through the use of STT-RAM and PCRAM. First, hybrid memory architectures that exploit the benefits of non-volatile memories while hiding the write latencies of STT-RAM memories will be introduced. Next, the talk will introduce optimizations that focus on using non-volatile memory architectures to create instant back-up copies of processor state to reduce vulnerability to transient errors. Finally, we will summarize additional opportunities of using non-volatile memories in a variety of applications ranging from supercomputing to embedded systems.

Vijaykrishnan Narayanan is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering Departments at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are in the areas of energy-aware reliable systems, embedded systems, on-chip networks, system design using emerging technologies and computer architecture. He has published more than 300 conference and journal papers in these areas and supervised more than 60 graduate students (including several Korean students who work in academia and Samsung). He was the founding co-editor-in-chief of ACM Journal of emerging technologies in computer systems and is the deputy editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design. He has won several awards including the Outstanding Alumni Award from SVCE, Penn State Engineering Society Outstanding Research Award, IEEE CAS VLSI Transactions Best Paper Award , ACM SIGDA outstanding new faculty award , Upsilon Pi Epsilon award for academic excellence, the IEEE Computer Society Richard E. Merwin Scholarship and the University of Madras first rank in Computer Science and Engineering.