Professor
College of Letters & Science | Department of Computer Science
Hometown: Chennai, India
Karu Sankaralingam is a Professor at UW-Madison, an Entrepreneur and Inventor and leads the Vertical Research Group. His work has been featured in industry forums of Mentor and Synopsys, and has been covered by the New York Times, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum. He has published over 100 research papers, has graduated 9 PhD students, is an inventor on 21 patents, and 9 award papers. He is a Fellow of IEEE. He is a recipient of the Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator Award in 2018, Wisconsin Innovation Award in 2016, IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architecture Award in 2012, the Emil H Steiger Distinguished Teaching award in 2014, the Letters and Science Philip R. Certain – Gary Sandefur Distinguished Faculty Award in 2013, and the NSF CAREER award in 2009. He founded SimpleMachines in 2017 which developed chip designs applying dataflow computing to push the limits of AI generality in hardware. In his career, he has led three chip projects: Mozart (16nm, HBM2 based design), MIAOW open source GPU on FPGA, and the TRIPS chip as a student during his PhD. In his research he has pioneered the principles of dataflow computing, focusing on the role of architecture, microarchitecture and the compiler. His research breakthroughs include constraint-theory based compilation for spatial architectures, specialized datapaths that can be dynamically configured, hybrid dataflow von-Neumann execution, modularizing specialization principles to allow programmability while retaining specialization benefits, new dataflow execution models that combine streaming and dataflow, and sampling theory applied to reliable computing.
Talks:
Placing AI in the Evolutionary Arc of Computing Technology
In this talk, I will placing AI and its recent explosive evolution in the historical context of computer technology evolution.
Does the Chip Industry need government subsidies
There is a recent push toward government subsidies for chip manufacturing. In this talk, I will outline some of the technical benefits of new chip foundries to investigate the question of the benefits of such subsidies.