SAFARI Live Seminar: Jawad Haj-Yahya 16 August 2021

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Join us for our next SAFARI Live Seminar with Jawad Haj-Yahya.

Monday, August 16 at 5:30 pm Zurich time (CEST)

Power Management Mechanisms in Modern Microprocessors and Their Security Implications
Jawad Haj-Yahya, Principal researcher at Huawei Research Center in Zurich

Livestream at 5:30 pm Zurich time (CEST) on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSuRWYa3k2g

Abstract:
Billions of new devices (e.g., sensors, wearables, smartphones, tablets, laptops, servers) are being deployed each year with new services and features that are driving a higher demand for high performance microprocessors, which often have high power consumption. Despite the failure of Dennard scaling, the slow-down in Moore’s Law, and the high power-density of modern processors, power management mechanisms have enabled significant advances in modern microprocessor performance and energy efficiency. Yet, current power management architectures also pose serious security implications. This is mainly because functionality rather than security has been the main consideration in the design of power management mechanisms in commodity microprocessors.

In this seminar, we provide a detailed overview of the state-of-the-art in power management mechanisms, power delivery networks (PDNs), and security vulnerabilities of current management mechanisms in modern microprocessors. We first present, analyze and enhance the advanced power management mechanisms of modern microprocessors to improve energy and performance in active and idle power states. Second, we present the design and tradeoffs of modern power delivery networks, evaluate their implications on performance and energy-efficiency, and describe new techniques to mitigate PDN inefficiencies. We will especially introduce the idea and benefits of hybrid power delivery networks. Third, we present some of the security vulnerabilities that exist in current management mechanisms of modern processors and propose mitigation techniques. We conclude that power management, power delivery and resulting security implications are critical and exciting areas to research to make modern systems both more energy-efficient and higher performance.

Bio:
Jawad Haj-Yahya received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Haifa University, Israel. Jawad was a processor architect for many years at Intel. His awards and honors include the Intel Achievement Award (the highest award at Intel), for his significant contribution to Intel processors. Jawad worked at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore as a cybersecurity Research Scientist where he led the architecture and design of a secure-processor project based on RISC-V architecture. He then moved to the Institute of Microelectronics (IME) at A*STAR Singapore where he was a Scientist III and worked on hardware security and an AI accelerator. Jawad next worked as a Senior Researcher in the SAFARI Research Group at ETH Zurich, where he led multiple projects on Energy-Efficient Computing and Hardware Security, before moving to his current position as principal researcher at Huawei Research Center in Zurich.

This talk is based on four papers we published respectively at HPCA 2020, ISCA 2020, MICRO 2020 and ISCA 2021. The links to individual papers and slides are below.

Posted in Papers, Seminar, Talks, Video.