You can attend the department research talk described below on 4/8 instead of coming to CS2190. If you choose to do that, email me by Friday at noon to say you were there, and explain the one thing that was presented that you understood and found most interesting. By your email, you are saying on your Honor that you did attend the talk.

The talk is pretty CpE oriented and will be targeted for faculty and research students, so you may not enjoy this unless it’s an area you are interested in -- if so, please go!


COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES 2008-2009

SPEAKER: Sally A. McKee
TOPIC: Portable, Scalable, per-Core Power Estimation for Intelligent Resource Management
DATE: Thursday, April 8
TIME: 3:30 - 4:30 p.m.
PLACE: Thornton Hall D223

Abstract: Performance, power, and temperature are now all first-order design constraints. Balancing power efficiency, thermal constraints, and performance requires some means to convey data about real-time power consumption and temperature to intelligent resource managers. Resource managers can use this information to meet performance goals, maintain
power budgets, and obey thermal constraints. Unfortunately, obtaining the required machine introspection is challenging. Most current chips provide no support for per-core power monitoring, and when support exists, it is not exposed to software. We present a methodology for deriving per-core power models using sampled performance counter values
and temperature sensor readings. We develop application-independent models for four different (four- to eight-core) platforms, validate their accuracy, and show how they can be used to guide scheduling decisions in power-aware resource managers. Model overhead is negligible, and predictions exhibit 2.8%-5.2% median error on the NAS,
SPEC OMP, and SPEC 2006 suites.

Due to some cancellations (for good reasons), there are choices about what you'll hear about in CS2190 on Thursday, April 8. You can vote for 1 or 2 of the choices below on what you want me to talk about!

• How Google Works (based on Prof. Gurumurthi's talk to CS101E)
• Some of Horton's research interests (CS education, humanities computing)
• An overview of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Computing for Good -- some example of how computing can make the world a better place

Vote using the Collab poll at this link by 9pm tonight (Weds!).

Over spring break I was at the ACM conference on CS education, and on a panel was Maggie Johnson, Google’s Director of Education and University Relations. She said that they have meetings with their new hires after they’ve worked 1 month, 2, 3 and 6 months. Here are some things new hires at Google say are hard about transitioning from college to working at Google:

1. Managing time well where there’s no structure due to classes, exams, semesters, etc.
2. Learning new things on their own.
3. Talking in front of groups.
4. Working in teams when there are real deadlines.
5. Playing well with others.
6. Dealing with managers.

Here in your degree program at UVa, we actually do some things to specifically address 2, 3, 4 and 5. You’re doing a self-learning activity here in CS2190, and courses like CS2110 and CS3240 focus on teamwork, groups and presenting your work to others.

Remember: this Sunday there are two deadlines:

• Progress report 2 on the self-learning activity.
• Ethics HW. (The cases handout is now posted in Resources on this website.)

Both are due Sunday, April 4, 11:50pm submitted to Collab.

Because the ethics class and HW have moved up a bit, I’m postponing your final two deadlines on the self-learning HW.

• The 2nd progress report will be due Sunday night, 11:50pm, April 4.
• The final report will be due a week later, Sunday, April 11, 11:50 pm.

Today in class (March 25) we’ll be doing the ethics activity that had been scheduled for April 8.
There will be a straight-forward homework that follows this that will be due Sunday, April 4, 11:50pm submitted to Collab. HW details given in class.

When: Saturday, 9am-3pm
Where: Across the E-school. CS in Olsson Hall, ECE in Thornton

There's CS Open House event this Saturday where people can look at demos and posters on research projects and other activities carried out by faculty and students in the CS and ECE departments here at UVa. This is part of the annual Engineering Open House that's happening this Saturday (Feb. 20, 9am-3pm). You'll find the demos from the CS department on the 2nd floor of Olsson Hall, while the ECE demos will be in their part of Thornton Hall.

Some of the posters and demos you can see involve undergrads in CS and CpE. Also, several undergrad students groups (the ACM, Student Game Developers) will have presentations about interesting things for computing majors. So this is a great chance for those who are early in their major to see what comes later on for students doing Comp. Sci. or Comp. Engin.!