Hewlett Packard Research Labs
1501 Page Mill Road MS 1177
Palo Alto, California 94304
Phone: (650) 857-2238

Fax: (650) 857-7029

Email: Partha.ranganathan@hp.com

Parthasarathy Ranganathan

(Partha)

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Partha_Ranganathan/

Home

34100 Cartwright Place
Fremont CA 94555

Phone: (510)-791-1664
Cell phone: (650) 743-6445

Email: Partha@gmail.com


Research Interests

Computer systems architecture and management, power efficiency, parallel and distributed computing

Key projects

·         Blades++ and exascale datacenters (TCO-aware next-generation blade systems)

·         SmartPower (power-efficient high-performance system, power modeling)

·         RSIM (system evaluation & architectures for media and database applications)

Education

Ph.D., May 2000, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University (GPA: 4.03/4.00)

Design of General-Purpose Systems for Emerging Applications

M.S., 1997, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University (GPA: 4.03/4.00)

An Evaluation of Memory Consistency Models for Shared-Memory Systems with ILP Processors

B.Tech., 1994, Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras (GPA: 9.1/10)

Employment History

Hewlett Packard Labs/Compaq Western Research Lab, 2000—current

    Principal research scientist, 2004-current

    Senior research scientist, 2003- 2004

    Research scientist/Member Technical Staff, 2000- 2003

Research Assistant, Rice University, 1995-2000

Research Intern, Digital Western Research Laboratory, Summer 1997

Research Intern, Digital Western Research Laboratory, Summer 1996

Awards and Recognition

·         6 internal company recognition awards

·         Rice University Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus, 2008, for notable accomplishments as an engineer and contributions to Rice and the community.

·         Technology review top 35 young innovators, 2007, who will create the future by transforming existing industries and establishing new ones

·         ESSL Research Leadership Award “for achieving recognition as a power management expert in the HP internal and external system architecture community”, December 2006, Awarded to one person at the lab level

·         IEEE Senior Member, August 2006, ACM Senior Member, December 2006

·         Hewlett Packard e-Award, in recognition of creating a virtual team to overcome international and organizational boundaries while combining two unique technology areas, namely user interfaces and low power design for new HP PDA products, April 2004

·         Alumni Acknowledgement Award, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, July 2002

·         Alumni Service Award, IIT Madras Alumni Association of North America, February 2002

·         Lodeiska Stockbridge Vaughan Fellowship, for outstanding achievement and promise, 1996-1997
(awarded to one graduate student from all departments in the Rice School of Engineering.) 

·         Rice University Fellowship, 1994-1995

·         Government of India -- Certificate of Merit, 1990

Selected Press Features

(40+ interviews and features, in magazines and newspapers in North America, South America, Asia, and Europe)

·         “HP Labs aims at exascale computing,” EEtimes, September, 2008

·         Hp.com patent profile (“features the company’s most creative people — the top inventors, patent holders and engineers – and what inspires them”), August, 2008

·         “Proliferation of devices hinders energy efficiency,” IndUS BusinessJournal, March, 2008

·         “HP Looks To Improve Power Management Coordination“, Slashdot 3/08

·         “Looking at datacenter power of the future,” ComputerWorld, February 08

·          “Benchmarking Power-Efficient Servers", Slashdot, 8/21/07

·         “HP researcher achieves victory in power struggle,” EE times, August 2007

·         “Future stock”, Times of India, September 2007

·         “MIT’s Tech Review Honors Young Energy Stars,” earth2tech.com

·         “Building an energy efficient home computer,” blogs.zdnet.com, September 2007

·         “HP's Green Data Center Portfolio Keeps Growing,” InternetNews.com, 2007

·         HP Global Citizenship Report, 2006

·         “The heat is off!” – featured in new ideas for revolutionary technology, MIT Technology Review, July 2005

·         Slashdot and Tom’s hardware guide, March 2005 (250+ responses)

·         Hp.com, physorg.com, News.PDA Live!, PDAlive.com, davesipaq.com. March 2005

·         (French) L’Ordinateur individual, March 2005

·         (Italian) Se Consumi Ti SpengoSE, WellcomeNews, March 2005

·         (Swedish) Forskning & Framsteg, March 2005

·         (Brazilian) A arte de economizar energia em portáteis, Jornal do Brasil, March 2005

·         (German) Neue Displays verbrauchen weniger Strom, Welt am Sonntag, January 2005

·         (Dutch) ArtikelAG, "PDA kan mit minder energy," December 2004

·          “Energy-saving screens,” MIT Technology Revie, December 2004

·         Mobile PC, "Fade to gray," November 2004

·         Power Electronics Technology, “Smarter Power Management Techniques Promise More Power for Portables,” September 2004

·         Lead feature in San Francisco Chronicle Business Section, “HP tests tactics to save batteries,” September 2004

·         Business Week, “The Race for Brawnier Batteries,” June 2004

·         Video interviews

Everyday Edisons, PBS 2008

Pod-Planet.com, “Advances in power management,” Podcast interview, August 2007

 

Research Contributions    

Exascale data centers. I am the principal investigator for the exascale datacenter project at HP Labs. This research seeks to create and demonstrate an end-to-end data center infrastructure solution designed ground-up with total costs of ownership and manageability in focus. We systematically redesign individual platform elements as efficient building blocks with their role in the broader solution in mind, to be used in combination with a powerful management layer at the datacenter level to dynamically monitor and manage resources for global efficiency and improved capabilities. Sub-contributions of the project include (1) disaggregated shared platforms in dematerialized datacenters, with powerful hardware-aware resource management co-designed into the virtualization layer, (2) connected by an end-to-end networking architecture, spanning vNICs to switches, providing QoS management over converged fabrics, (3) with rich management and platform capabilities delivered through a ecosystem of virtual appliances driven by powerful abstractions for cross-layer communication and coordination.

 

Power- and energy-efficiency. My recent research focuses on designing power- and energy-efficient systems for future computing environments (from small mobile devices to dense servers in data centers).  Some of the contributions of this work include: Energy-adaptive displays and energy-aware user interfaces that pioneered the notion of displays that adapt their energy consumption based on scope of user interest; this improves display battery usage two-fold to twenty-fold. Heterogeneous multi-core architectures that propose the use of core diversity in chip multiprocessor to match workload requirements to architectural power efficiency; this enables two-fold to ten-fold improvements in processor power. Power-aware blade architectures that propose the notion of power budget enforcement at the enclosure level through hardware-software co-ordination to leverage variations in typical usage patterns; this improves blade power budgets by a factor of two. Facilities-aware data center resource provisioning solutions that adapt workload scheduling to optimize for power and cooling costs in addition to performance; for example, temperature-aware resource scheduling can reduce annual cooling costs (often millions of dollars) in large data centers by half.  Our work has also developed several new approaches for power measuring and monitoring, including JouleSort, energy-based statistical profiling, location-aware knowledge planes, as well as proxy-based environmental modeling. Using these tools, we have also performed several detailed studies (often the first such in the literature) of power consumption of real system deployments, and have influenced industry standards and metrics.

 

High-performance and better programmability. My dissertation research focused on application-optimized architecture designs in response to changes in the application mix favoring database, media, and communication applications, as well as improvements to performance, programmability, and simulation of multiprocessor systems enabled by the emergence of processors that aggressively leveraged instruction-level parallelism (ILP).  Specific optimizations that emerged out of this work include reconfigurable caches – a design that enabled on-the-fly reuse of otherwise under-utilized memory resources, SC++ -- an implementation of sequential consistency that bridged the programmability-performance gap in memory consistency models, fuzzy and selective acquires – software-only primitives to reduce synchronization overheads, and algorithms for producer- and consumer-initiated prefetching for memory and coherence overhead. Also, as part of this work, we developed RSIM, the first public simulator that modeled ILP-based multiprocessors in great detail. RSIM has had more than 2000 unique downloads and has been shown to address large errors otherwise possible with earlier-generation simulators.  

Patents

More than 50 patents pending or issued. Please see U.S. patents & trademark office (uspto.gov) for public information.

Keynotes, Panels, and Tutorials

1.       Designing servers and datacenters for the exascale computing era, Keynote presentation at the Rice University Industrial Affiliates Meeting, 2008

2.       System implications of integrated photonics (with Norm Jouppi), International Symposium on Low Power Electronics, September, 2008

3.       Low-Power PDA displays, Keynote feature presentation at PortablePower 2004

4.       The Innovation Process, with the exascale datacenter as a case study, HP GDIC Innovation Symposium, August 2008

5.       The Power Management Challenge: Getting the Next 100X, Keynote presentation at the 2nd workshop on optimizations for DSPs and Embedded Systems, 2004

6.       Panel Participation:

o    Towards a zero-carbon footprint for the IT ecosystem: energy-efficient servers and datacenters, Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership Green IT workshop, 2008

o    Rethinking server design for the ensemble, Gigascale institute workshop, 2008

o    Panel Chair, “Power management from cores to datacenters: where are we going to get the next 10X?”, ISLPED 2008

o    Exascale Software Challenges DARPA white paper, July 2008

o    National Science Foundation, Computer systems panel, April 2008

o    “Energy-efficient Next-Generation Data Centers for Sustainable Business Outcomes”, HP Press Panel, July 2007

o    National Science Foundation, Computer systems panel, January 2007

o    National Science Foundation, Computer systems panel, September 2005

o    Panel – “Important Research Challenges in Temperature-aware Computer Systems”, TACS, June 2005

o    Panel – “New Products and Applications”, PortablePower 2004

o    National Science Foundation, Computer systems panel, June 2004

o    National Science Foundation, Computer systems panel, February 2003

o    Round-table discussion on ``Limits and Future'', Workshop on Mixing Logic and DRAM: Chips that Compute and Remember, Denver. June 1997.

7.       Tutorials

o    Enterprise Power and Cooling: A chip-to-datacenter perspective, HotChips 2007

o    Enterprise Power and Cooling: A chip-to-datacenter perspective, ASPLOS 2006

Book

1.       Parthasarathy Ranganathan and T. N. Vijaykumar, “Power-aware computer architectures: from chips to data centers,” Morgan Kaufmann, Under development, for December 2009

Publications (copies available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Partha_Ranganathan)

Under preparation/review

2.         “Power-aware computing principles,” Parthasarathy Ranganathan, CACM 2008 [pdf]

3.        “A Comparison of High-Level Full-System Power Models,” Suzanne Rivoire, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Christos Kozyrakis, 2008 [pdf]

4.         “Delivering Energy Proportionality with Non Energy Proportional Systems – Optimizations at the Ensemble Layer,” Niraj Tolia, Zhikui Wang, Manish Marwah, Cullen Bash, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Xiaoyun Zhu, 2008 [pdf]

5.         “Power Aware Design and Operation of Data Center Networks,” Priya Mahadevan, Puneet Sharma, Sujata Banerjee, Partha Ranganathan, 2008 [pdf]

6.         “Tracking the Power in an Enterprise Decision Support System,” Justin Meza, Mehul A. Shah, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Mike Fitzner, Jay Veazey, 2008 [pdf]

7.        “Motivating integrated switch and NIC functionality for future manycore servers,” J. Mudigonda et al, 2008 [pdf]

8.        “Micromanagers: Platforms for Manageability in Future Virtualized Multicore Environments,” Jacob Leverich et al, 2008 [pdf]

9.        “Slice and Share: Memory disaggregation for consolidation and cost-effectiveness”, Kevin Lim et al, 2008 [pdf]

10.     “Zephyr, Hot and Cold: Unified power and cooling management for the datacenter”,  Niraj Tolia, Zhikui Wang, Manish Marwah, Cullen Bash, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Xiaoyun Zhu, 2008 [pdf]

11.     "vManage: Coordinated Cross-layer Management in Virtualized Systems," Sanjay Kumar, Vanish Talwar, Vibhore Kumar, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Karsten Schwan, 2008 [pdf]

12.     “COVERT: Configurable Virtual Redundancy with Transparent Availability on Commodity Software,” Nidhi Aggarwal, Norman Jouppi, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Jim Smith, Kewal Saluja, 2008 [pdf]

13.      "Defining and Evaluating Metrics for Manageability Efficiency," Jacob Leverich, Vanish Talwar, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Christos Kozyrakis, 2007 [pdf]

14.      “Closely Coupled Operating System Pairs for Emerging Manageability Architectures,” Vanish Talwar and Parthasarathy Ranganathan, 2007 [pdf]

Reviewed publications

15.     “Power modeling and measurement,” Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Suzanne Rivoire, Justin Moore, Advances in Computers, Elsevier, Book Chapter, 2008 [pdf]

16.     "Implementing High-Availability Memory with a Duplication Cache," Nidhi Aggarwal, Norman Jouppi, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Jim Smith, Kewal Saluja, Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, December 2008 [pdf]

17.      “M-Channels and M-Brokers: Coordinated Management in Virtualized Systems,” Sanjay Kumar, Vanish Talwar, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Ripal Nathuji, Karsten Schwan, Workshop on Managed Multi-Core Systems (MMCS),  June 2008 [pdf]

18.     “Feedback Control Algorithms for Power Management of Servers,”  Zhikui Wang et al, Third International Workshop on Feedback Control Implementation and Design in Computing Systems and Networks (FeBID), June 2008 [pdf]

19.     vManage: Coordinated Management in Virtualized Systems,” Sanjay Kumar, Vanish Talwar, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Karsten Schwan, Third Workshop on Hot Topics in Autonomic Computing (HotAC), April 2008 [pdf]

20.     Coevolution of Operating Systems and Asymmetric Single-ISA CMPs,” Nathan Binkert, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Jayaram Mudigonda, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Vanish Talwar, IEEE Micro, 2008 [pdf]

21.     "Microblades and Megaservers: Server Architectures for Emerging Warehouse-Computing Environments,",  Reza Bacchus, Jichuan Chang, Tom Flynn,  Kevin Lim, Chandrakant Patel, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Robert Van Cleve, Proceedings of Techcon, May 2008 [hp-pdf]

22.     Understanding and Designing New Server Architectures for Emerging Warehouse-Computing Environments, Kevin Lim, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Jichuan Chang, Chandrakant Patel, Trevor Mudge, Steve Reinhardt, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2008 [pdf]