CSE Researchers Win Best Paper Award at HPCA 2013

A team of CSE researchers including U-M graduate student Richard Sampson and Prof. Thomas F. Wenisch have won the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), which took place February 23-27, 2013 in Shenzhen, China.

The paper, entitled “Sonic Millip3De: Massively Parallel 3D-Stacked Accelerator for 3D Ultrasound,” was authored by Mr. Sampson along with Ming Yang, Siyuan Wei, and Prof. Chaitali Chakrabarti of Arizona State University and Prof. Wenisch. It describes a new architecture and accelerator that can be used to enable a hand-held three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound system for non-invasive medical imaging. The extreme computational and power requirements of 3D ultrasound image formation has, to date, precluded the development of such hand-held 3D capable devices.

In the paper, the authors describe the Sonic Millip3De, a new system architecture and accelerator for 3D ultrasound beamformation – the most computationally intensive aspect of image formation. Their three-layer die-stacked design features a custom beamsum accelerator that employs massive data parallelism and a streaming transform-select-reduce pipeline architecture enabled by their new iterative beamsum delay calculation algorithm. Based on RTL-level design and floorplanning for an industrial 45nm process, the authors show Sonic Millip3De can enable 3D ultrasound with a fully sampled 128×96 transducer array within a 16W full-system power budget (400x less than a conventional DSP solution) and will meet a 5W safe power target by the 11nm node.

Remarkably, this is the second year in a row that Prof. Wenisch has received the best paper at HPCA. In 2012, he received the best award for co-authoring the paper, “Computational Sprinting.”

Prof. Wenisch received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and joined the faculty at Michigan that year. His research is focused on computer architecture with particular emphasis on multiprocessor and multicore systems, multicore programmability, data center architecture, and performance evaluation methodology. He is a member of the department’s Advanced Computer Architecture Lab.

Prof. Wenisch is inventor on one patent and co-inventor on six patents. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2009 and was named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Assistant Professor of EECS in 2011. He was recognized in the International Symposium of Computer Architecture Hall of Fame in 2011 for having eight or more papers in ISCA.