News
Sep 11, 2015
CAreDroid Systems Wins MobiCom Awards
The CAreDroid system that UCLA professor Mani Srivastava's student Salma Elmalaki started under the Variability Expedition (but subsequently generalized to other forms of variations) with Lucas Wanner as a collaborator on operating system and programming language support for mobile application adaptation in response to variation of user context, hardware characteristics, and operating conditions, won two awards at this year's ACM MobiCom: Best Paper Award and also the Best Community Paper Award, both for co-authors Elmalaki, Wanner and Srivastava. (The community award is given to the paper making the most contributions in terms of new data or hardware or software.) For more on the awards, visit http://www.sigmobile.org/mobicom/2015/awards.html. [more]

Feb 12, 2014
Expedition Papers Accepted to Premier EDA Conferences
Ph.D. student Abbas Rahimi from UCSD and co-authors have papers accepted at the premier electronic design automation (EDA) conferences in Europe (at DATE 2014) and the U.S. (at DAC 2014). Rahimi will present at the Design Automation Conference to be held in San Francisco this June. He is first author on the DAC paper, "Energy-Efficient GPGPU Architectures via Collaborative Compilation and Memristive Memory-Based Computing," co-authored with colleagues from UCSD, UC Santa Barbara and institutions in Italy and Switzerland. Before that, in Dresden next month, Rahimi is first author on "Temporal Memoization for Energy-Efficient Timing Error Recovery in GPGPUs." Variability Expedition director Rajesh Gupta is senior on both papers, and will make the presentation at DATE. There are links to both paper on CSE's Microelectronic Embedded Systems Laboratory (MESL) from the Publications section of the Variability website.

Jan 23, 2014
Variability Papers at 19th Asia South Pacific DAC
Two papers by Variability Expedition PIs were part of a special session with invited papers at the 19th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC 2014). It took place Jan. 21-23, 2014 in Singapore. The papers were: "Accurate and Inexpensive Performance Monitoring for Variability-Aware Systems," by Liangzhen Lai and Puneet Gupta (both UCLA); and "QED Post-Silicon Validation and Debug: Frequently Asked Questions," by David Lin and Subhasish Mitra (Stanford). Mitra organized the special session on overcoming silicon bottlenecks, focusing on variability, reliability, validation and debuggging. Other Expedition papers at ASP-DAC included one on "Rethinking Error Injection for Effective Resilience," co-authored by Mitra and Hyungmin Cho of Stanford, and collaborators from the University of Texas, Austin.[Link goes to conference abstracts.] [more]

Oct 29, 2013
NSF Variability Expedition Review and Joint Workshop
Participants in the NSF Variability Expedition will meet Nov. 21-23 at UC Irvine for a review of Expedition interactions. The review is co-located as a Joint Workshop with a German Research Foundation (DFG) Priority Program 1500 workshop, which will take place on Saturday, Nov. 23. The German program is focused on "Design and Architectures of Dependable Embedded Systems - A Grand Challenge in the Nano Age," which was launched in 2009. Click on the link to register for the meetings. [more]

Sep 10, 2013
Variability Expedition Presence at Upcoming CODES+ISSS in Montreal
The International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS) is the premier conference for system-level design. It's part of Embedded Systems Week 2013 in Montreal, Canada, and the Variability Expedition will be well-represented. On Oct. 2, three of the 13 papers involve Variability Expedition co-authors. In the morning, a UCLA-based team has a paper on "VarEMU: An Emulation Testbed for Variability-Aware Software," co-authored by Lucas Wanner, Salma Elmalaki, Liangzhen Lai, co-PI Puneet Gupta and Expedition deputy director Mani Srivastava. Then in the afternoon, UC Irvine Ph.D. student Majid Namaki-Shoushtari will present ARGO - "Aging-awaRe GPGPU Register File AllOcation," a joint paper with Abbas Rahimi, Nikil Dutt, Puneet Gupta and Rajesh Gupta. The same afternoon, Andrea Marongiu will present a paper on "A Variability-Aware OpenMP Environment for Efficient Execution of Accuracy-Configurable Computation on Shared-FPU Processor Clusters." The paper is joint among Marongiu and Luca Benini, both of the University of Bologna, and UCSD's Abbas Rahimi and Rajesh Gupta. [See Publications for advance PDFs of the latter two papers.] UCLA's Puneet Gupta is also giving a tutorial on the first morning of CODES+ISSS on "Cross‐Layer Reliability Modeling and Optimization for Embedded Systems under Process Variations." Other speakers include Muhammad Shafique (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), as well as Hiren Patel and Siddharth Garg (both from the University of Waterloo). [more]

Sep 9, 2013
Stanford's Mitra is Everywhere at ITC 2013 in Anaheim
Variability Expedition co-PI Subhasish Mitra from Stanford is Program Chair for the International Test Conference next year (ITC 2014). He follows this year's Program Chair, Rob Aitken of ARM, who sits on the Expedition's Advisory Board. ITC 2013 runs all this week in Anaheim, Calif., and Mitra will receive the IEEE Fellow Award. On Sept. 10, he will also chair the ever-popular "Elevator Talks" session, which this year includes a talk by fellow Variability co-PI Nikil Dutt of UC Irvine. Mitra also has two papers at ITC: one is on "Self-Repair of Uncore Components in Robust System-on-Chips: An OpenSPARC T2 Case Study," co-authored with Y. Li, E. Cheng and S. Marker. It demonstrates the practicality of the OpenSPARC T2 design. The other paper is "Early-Life Failure Detection Using SATbased ATPG," co-authored with researchers from the University of Freiburg (Germany) and Samsung Electronics. [more]

Sep 9, 2013
UCLA's Dolecek Receives Intel Early Career Faculty Award
Co-PI Lara Dolecek at UCLA is one of 15 recipients worldwide to receive an Intel Early Career Award --out of more than 100 applicants at the assistant professor level. It will support her research on data reliability and data reduction. Dolecek is also the recipient of a UCLA Faculty Career Development Award for the 2013-'14 academic year. [more]

Sep 9, 2013
UCLA's Gupta Tutorial at CICC 2013 on Sept. 25
On Sept. 25, UCLA's Puneet Gupta will give a tutorial on "Design for Nanoscale Patterning." It is in conjunction with the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) in San Jose, Calif. See Presentations for the full tutorial abstract. [more]

May 31, 2013
Variability Expedition Presentation Now Online
On May 14, PI Rajesh Gupta addressed a meeting of NSF Expeditions in Computing researchers and administrators in Washington, D.C. His slides are now available in PDF format from this website. [more]

May 3, 2013
Variability Team Posts Recent and New Publications
The prolific UCSD team of 3rd-year Ph.D. computer engineering student Abbas Rahimi, Variability Expedition PI Rajesh Gupta, and their colleague Luca Benini from the University of Bologna have produced a new batch of papers, including two presented in March at DATE 2013, another paper for Design Automation Conference in June, and an article on application-adaptive guardbanding accepted in March for publication this year in IEEE Transactions on Computers. See Publications for details and links to all manuscripts. [more]

Feb 20, 2013
DAC Best Paper Candidate
An Aging-Aware Compilation paper by UCSD and UNIBO was nominated as a Best Paper Candidate at the 50th Design Automation Conference (DAC). The paper is "Aging-Aware Compiler-Directed VLIW Assignment for GPU Architectures," by Abbas Rahimi, Luca Benini, and Rajesh K. Gupta. This year's DAC will take place June 2-6 in Austin, Texas.

Dec 3, 2012
Lara Dolecek Wins Top Award
Variability co-PI Lara Dolecek of UCLA is the recipient of the prestigious Okawa Foundation Research Award for 2012. According to PI Rajesh Gupta, "her research topic (Coding for Next Generation Storage Systems) strengthens her collaboration with Steve Swanson. Lara also brought the Expedition to ASILOMAR recently." The Okawa prize honors top young researchers working in the fields of information and telecommunications. [more]

Sep 25, 2012
UC Irvine's Dutt Delivers Keynotes in October
UC Irvine PI Nikil Dutt will deliver keynote presentations in Finland and Canada in October 2012. He will speak at the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping (Tampere, Finland), and the 2012 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (Quebec City, Quebec, Canada).

Sep 25, 2012
Nikil Dutt Organizes MeAOW 2012
UC Irvine PI Nikil Dutt is organizing the Memory Architecture and Organization Workshop, which takes place Oct. 11, 2012, as part of ESWeek in Tampere, Finland. [more]

Sep 25, 2012
UC Irvine's Dutt Helps Organize Workshop at ICCAD 2012
UC Irvine PI Nikil Dutt is co-organizing the International Workshop on Hardware/Software Techniques for Cross-Layer Resiliency, which takes place Nov. 8, 2012, in San Jose, Calif. The objective of this workshop -- which is co-located with ICCAD 2012 -- is to bring the attention of design automation community to the multilevel reliability challenges and solutions and possible paradigm shift to consider reliability throughout the design flow, from devices to systems and applications. [more]

Jul 19, 2012
Alex Nicolau Presents at SURF-IT Session
Variability co-PI Alex Nicolau from UC Irvine did the third in a series of presentations to undergraduates who are part of Calit2 UCI's SURF-IT summer research program. Nicolau focused on the classification of programs and program optimization for performance versus power consumption. [more]