Professor Wins Intel Outstanding Researcher Award

Professor Moinuddin Qureshi received Intel’s 2020 Outstanding Researcher Award in February. He is one of 18 researchers who won this award for their work in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and other emerging innovative technologies. 

“It is a great honor to receive this award,” Qureshi said. “I have always enjoyed collaborating with Intel, right from my younger days of summer internships till now. Intel has a great set of researchers and you get feedback that keeps the research practical and useful.”

Qureshi was recognized for designing efficient and robust hybrid memory architectures. These memory systems combine conventional DRAM memory modules with emerging memory technologies such as non-volatile memory (NVM) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

In hybrid memory systems, the placement of data can determine performance and energy efficiency. Ideally, frequently accessed data is placed in the low-latency high-bandwidth memory, and the remaining data in high-capacity low-cost memory.

Qureshi’s group has developed innovative designs such as Alloy Cache, which outperforms combines the tag and data together to do the cache lookup in single access and outperforms most designs.

His group has also developed low-cost set-associative DRAM caches (called ACCORD), which maintain the low-latency of direct-mapped caches while providing conflict-miss reduction of set-associative caches. His group is currently investigating low-cost compression designs that are suitable for large giga-scale memory systems while limiting the performance degradation from metadata lookups.

Intel has supported Qureshi’s group in developing hybrid memory designs for more than five years. This research has produced several publications at flagship architecture conferences, such as the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) and International Symposium on Microarchitecture. The grant has supported the Ph.D. dissertations of three graduate students.

“Intel is one of the few companies that has an accessible funding model focused on fostering academic research,” Qureshi said. “I am thankful to Intel for the continued support and look forward to the collaboration.”

This is Qureshi’s second Intel award. He first won the inaugural Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Award in 2012.

Qureshi leads the Memory Systems Lab at Georgia Tech. His research group looks at a variety of topics ranging from quantum computing to hardware security to robust artificial intelligence algorithms to designing future memory systems.