Carnegie Mellon University

John Shen

John Shen

Distinguished Service Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Address Carnegie Mellon University
Silicon Valley
Building 23
Moffett Field, CA 94035

Bio

John Paul Shen was a Nokia Fellow and the founding director of Nokia Research Center - North America Lab. NRC-NAL had research teams pursuing a wide range of research projects in mobile Internet and mobile computing. In six years (2007-2012), NRC-NAL filed over 100 patents, published over 200 papers, hosted about 100 Ph.D. interns, and collaborated with a dozen universities. Prior to joining Nokia in late 2006, John was the Director of the Microarchitecture Research Lab at Intel. MRL had research teams in Santa Clara, Portland, and Austin, pursuing research on aggressive ILP and TLP microarchitectures for IA32 and IA64 processors. Prior to joining Intel in 2000, John was a tenured Full Professor in the ECE Department at CMU, where he supervised a total of 17 Ph.D. students and dozens of M.S. students, received multiple teaching awards, and published two books and more than 100 research papers. One of his books, “Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors” was used in the EE382A Advanced Processor Architecture course at Stanford, where he co-taught the EE382A course. After spending 15 years in the industry, all in the Silicon Valley, he returned to CMU in the fall of 2015 as a tenured Full Professor in the ECE Department, and is based at the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley campus.

Education

Ph.D.
Electrical Engineering
University of Southern California

M.S.
Electrical Engineering
University of Southern California

B.S.
Electrical Engineering
University of Michigan

Research

Modern Processor Design and Evaluation

With the emergence of superscalar processors, phenomenal performance increases are being achieved via the exploitation of instruction-level parallelism (ILP). Software tools for aiding the design and validation of complex superscalar processors are being developed. These tools, such as VMW (Visualization-Based Microarchitecture Workbench), facilitate the rigorous specification and validation of microarchitectures.

Architecture and Compilation for Instruction-Level Parallelism

Microarchitecture and code transformation techniques for effective exploitation of ILP are being studied. Synergistic combinations of static (compile-time software) and dynamic (run-time hardware) mechanisms are being explored. Going beyond a single instruction stream is necessary to achieve effective use of wide superscalar machines, as well as tightly coupled small-scale multiprocessors.

Dependable and Fault-Tolerant Computing

Techniques are being developed to exploit the idling machine resources of ILP machines for concurrent error checking. As ILP machines get wider, the utilization of the machine resources will decrease. The idling resources can potentially be used for enhancing system dependability via compile-time transformation techniques.

Keywords

  • Wearable, mobile, and cloud computing
  • Ultra energy-efficient computing for sensor processing
  • Real-time data analytics
  • Mobile-user behavior modelling and deep learning