Krishna Palem
Encyclopedia
Krishna V. Palem is an American computer
scientist and engineer of India
n origin and is the Kenneth and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing at Rice University
and the director of Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics (ISNE) at Nanyang Technological University
(NTU). He is recognized for his "pioneering contributions to the algorithmic, compilation, and architectural foundations of embedded computing", as stated in the citation of his 2009 Wallace McDowell Award
, the "highest technical award made solely by the IEEE Computer Society
".
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
where he worked on Probabilistic Algorithms and Optimizing Compilers till 1994. Since 1994, he held tenured faculty positions at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
at NYU (1994–1999) and Georgia Institute of Technology
(1999–2006). Since 2007, he is been at Rice University
with joint appointments in Computer Science
, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Statistics
.
In 2000, Palem co-founded the Proceler Inc., an Atlanta based venture funded company and served as its Chief Technology Officer.
In 2006-07, he was both a Canon Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University
, Singapore
and a Moore Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the California Institute of Technology
.
In 2007, he also founded the Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics (ISNE) at Nanyang Technological University
, Singapore
and currently serves as its director.
In 1998, with Guang Gao, he started the International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES) workshop series in 1998 which has since grown in to the ACM
/IEEE sponsored CASES symposium, one of the three anchor conferences of the Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek).
. His views expressed in 1996 suggesting the "need for programming tools and software support to eventually compile algorithms implemented in standard and widely-used languages such as C onto the hardware platforms" was the mission statement of this laboratory. His PhD advisee Suren Talla's dissertation on this topic, 'Adaptive EPIC Architectures and their Compilers', was awarded the Janet Fabri prize.
Palem fully developed this concept through 'architecture assembly' through Proceler Inc. Architecture assembly was the foundation of the product offering by Proceler Inc. and was first documented in a patent that Proceler Inc. filed in 2002. Architecture assembly produced custom hardware having pre-synthesized computing elements readily available, and using a compiler to rapidly choose and assemble an application specific and therefore a Dynamically VAriable Instruction SeT Architecture (DVAITA). The Analysts' Choice Awards recognized this technology as one of the four nominees for the category of Outstanding technology of 2001. Speaking about this award nomination, Max Baron, the editor-in-chief of Microprocessor report, said that this technology "may develop or be reborn into variants that can change our view of configurable processors, extensions of instruction sets, hardware interpreters, and application-specific accelerators."
Under Palem's direction, the React-ILP laboratory developed the TRIMARAN system, co-developed with the CAR group of HP Labs
and the Impact project of the University of Illinois, and was aimed at helping universities conduct research on the then emerging EPIC technology embodied in the Itanium
processor.
Since 2002, Palem has been developing the thermodynamic foundations for radically new ways of approaching the challenge of lowering energy consumption by trading computational accuracy. The implementation of this principle in the context of CMOS
devices lead to the invention of a widely known patented technology called the Probabilistic CMOS (PCMOS
), which Technology Review
published by MIT recognized as one of the 10 technologies that are "most likely to change the way we live", in 2008. PCMOS was shown to be useful in designing energy and power efficient architectures by his group. Logic and arithmetic being the building blocks of such architectures, PCMOS motivated a new Probabilistic Boolean Logic (PBL) and its arithmetic, which Palem developed with his PhD advisee Lakshmi Chakrapani, whose dissertation received the Sigma-Xi best PhD thesis award. PCMOS technology has also been favorably reviewed in the press recently when a chip for encryption that was 30 times more energy efficient was announced at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference
in February 2009.
Since 2008, Palem has also been a Baker Institute Rice Scholar and has been pursuing embedded computing and PCMOS
technology based applications of benefit to society, particularly through the I-Slate as an educational tool for resource constrained societies. This project is being pursued in Southern India in collaboration with the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
and ISNE at Nanyang Technological University
. As a part of their 125th anniversary, IEEE recognized I-Slate as one of the seven "Technologies That Will Change the Way Humans Interact with Machines, the World and Each Other"
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
scientist and engineer of India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n origin and is the Kenneth and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing at Rice University
Rice University
William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University or Rice, is a private research university located on a heavily wooded campus in Houston, Texas, United States...
and the director of Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics (ISNE) at Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University is one of the two largest public universities in Singapore with the biggest campus in Singapore and the world's largest engineering college. Its lush 200-hectare Yunnan Garden campus was the Youth Olympic Village of the world's first 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in...
(NTU). He is recognized for his "pioneering contributions to the algorithmic, compilation, and architectural foundations of embedded computing", as stated in the citation of his 2009 Wallace McDowell Award
McDowell Award
The W. Wallace McDowell Award is awarded by the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other similar innovative contributions that fall within the scope of Computer Society interest...
, the "highest technical award made solely by the IEEE Computer Society
IEEE Computer Society
The IEEE Computer Society is a professional society of IEEE. Its purpose and scope is “to advance the theory, practice, and application of computer and information processing science and technology” and the “professional standing of its members.” The CS is the largest of 38 technical societies...
".
Career and background
He started his career in 1986 as a Research Staff Member at the IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division.The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles north of New York City, a building in Hawthorne, New York, and offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.- Overview :The...
where he worked on Probabilistic Algorithms and Optimizing Compilers till 1994. Since 1994, he held tenured faculty positions at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is an independent division of New York University under the Faculty of Arts & Science that serves as a center for research and advanced training in computer science and mathematics...
at NYU (1994–1999) and Georgia Institute of Technology
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...
(1999–2006). Since 2007, he is been at Rice University
Rice University
William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University or Rice, is a private research university located on a heavily wooded campus in Houston, Texas, United States...
with joint appointments in Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
.
In 2000, Palem co-founded the Proceler Inc., an Atlanta based venture funded company and served as its Chief Technology Officer.
In 2006-07, he was both a Canon Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University is one of the two largest public universities in Singapore with the biggest campus in Singapore and the world's largest engineering college. Its lush 200-hectare Yunnan Garden campus was the Youth Olympic Village of the world's first 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in...
, Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
and a Moore Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
.
In 2007, he also founded the Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics (ISNE) at Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University is one of the two largest public universities in Singapore with the biggest campus in Singapore and the world's largest engineering college. Its lush 200-hectare Yunnan Garden campus was the Youth Olympic Village of the world's first 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in...
, Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
and currently serves as its director.
In 1998, with Guang Gao, he started the International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES) workshop series in 1998 which has since grown in to the ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
/IEEE sponsored CASES symposium, one of the three anchor conferences of the Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek).
Research
After he moved to NYU in 1994, he founded and headed one of the earliest computer science laboratories in academia on the topic of Embedded Computing called Real-time Compilation Technologies and Instruction Level Parallelism (ReaCT-ILP) within the Courant Institute of Mathematical SciencesCourant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is an independent division of New York University under the Faculty of Arts & Science that serves as a center for research and advanced training in computer science and mathematics...
. His views expressed in 1996 suggesting the "need for programming tools and software support to eventually compile algorithms implemented in standard and widely-used languages such as C onto the hardware platforms" was the mission statement of this laboratory. His PhD advisee Suren Talla's dissertation on this topic, 'Adaptive EPIC Architectures and their Compilers', was awarded the Janet Fabri prize.
Palem fully developed this concept through 'architecture assembly' through Proceler Inc. Architecture assembly was the foundation of the product offering by Proceler Inc. and was first documented in a patent that Proceler Inc. filed in 2002. Architecture assembly produced custom hardware having pre-synthesized computing elements readily available, and using a compiler to rapidly choose and assemble an application specific and therefore a Dynamically VAriable Instruction SeT Architecture (DVAITA). The Analysts' Choice Awards recognized this technology as one of the four nominees for the category of Outstanding technology of 2001. Speaking about this award nomination, Max Baron, the editor-in-chief of Microprocessor report, said that this technology "may develop or be reborn into variants that can change our view of configurable processors, extensions of instruction sets, hardware interpreters, and application-specific accelerators."
Under Palem's direction, the React-ILP laboratory developed the TRIMARAN system, co-developed with the CAR group of HP Labs
HP Labs
HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for Hewlett-Packard. The lab has some 600 researchersin seven locations throughout the world....
and the Impact project of the University of Illinois, and was aimed at helping universities conduct research on the then emerging EPIC technology embodied in the Itanium
Itanium
Itanium is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture . Intel markets the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems...
processor.
Since 2002, Palem has been developing the thermodynamic foundations for radically new ways of approaching the challenge of lowering energy consumption by trading computational accuracy. The implementation of this principle in the context of CMOS
CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits...
devices lead to the invention of a widely known patented technology called the Probabilistic CMOS (PCMOS
PCMOS
PCMOS is a semiconductor manufacturing technology invented by Pr. Krishna Palem of Rice University and Director of NTU's Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics . The technology hopes to compete against current CMOS technology...
), which Technology Review
Technology Review
Technology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...
published by MIT recognized as one of the 10 technologies that are "most likely to change the way we live", in 2008. PCMOS was shown to be useful in designing energy and power efficient architectures by his group. Logic and arithmetic being the building blocks of such architectures, PCMOS motivated a new Probabilistic Boolean Logic (PBL) and its arithmetic, which Palem developed with his PhD advisee Lakshmi Chakrapani, whose dissertation received the Sigma-Xi best PhD thesis award. PCMOS technology has also been favorably reviewed in the press recently when a chip for encryption that was 30 times more energy efficient was announced at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference
International Solid-State Circuits Conference
International Solid-State Circuits Conference is a global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and Systems-on-a-Chip. The Conference offers a unique opportunity for engineers working at the cutting edge of IC design to maintain technical currency, and to network with leading...
in February 2009.
Since 2008, Palem has also been a Baker Institute Rice Scholar and has been pursuing embedded computing and PCMOS
PCMOS
PCMOS is a semiconductor manufacturing technology invented by Pr. Krishna Palem of Rice University and Director of NTU's Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics . The technology hopes to compete against current CMOS technology...
technology based applications of benefit to society, particularly through the I-Slate as an educational tool for resource constrained societies. This project is being pursued in Southern India in collaboration with the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad is an autonomous university in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India. It was established in 1998 with seed support from the Government of Andhra Pradesh...
and ISNE at Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University
Nanyang Technological University is one of the two largest public universities in Singapore with the biggest campus in Singapore and the world's largest engineering college. Its lush 200-hectare Yunnan Garden campus was the Youth Olympic Village of the world's first 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in...
. As a part of their 125th anniversary, IEEE recognized I-Slate as one of the seven "Technologies That Will Change the Way Humans Interact with Machines, the World and Each Other"
Awards and Fellowships
- 2008 W. Wallace McDowell Award, IEEE Computer Society's highest technical award for "pioneering contributions to the algorithmic, compilation, and architectural foundations of embedded computing".
- I-Slate, featured at the IEEE's 125th anniversary as one of the seven "Technologies That Will Change the Way Humans Interact with Machines, the World and Each Other", 2009.
- PCMOS, recognized by Technology ReviewTechnology ReviewTechnology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...
published by MIT as one of the "10 technologies that we think are most likely to change the way we live", 2008. - Moore Distinguished Faculty Fellow, California Institute of TechnologyCalifornia Institute of TechnologyThe California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
, 2006–07 - Canon Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological UniversityNanyang Technological UniversityNanyang Technological University is one of the two largest public universities in Singapore with the biggest campus in Singapore and the world's largest engineering college. Its lush 200-hectare Yunnan Garden campus was the Youth Olympic Village of the world's first 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in...
, SingaporeSingaporeSingapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the... - Fellow of the ACMAssociation for Computing MachineryThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
, 2006, for "contributions to compiler optimization and embedded computing" - Fellow of the IEEE, 2004, for "contributions to embedded computing".
- Invited Professor, École Normale SupérieureÉcole Normale SupérieureThe École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...
, Paris, France, 2004 – 05. - DVAITA, Nominee, Outstanding technology by Analysts Choice, 2002.
- Teaching Excellence, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1999.
- External Recognition Award, IBMIBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
Research Division, 1994.