2013 Maurice Wilkes Award Given to Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan

......Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan received the 2013 Maurice Wilkes Award “for contributions to the design of power-efficient microblade servers and pioneering work in disaggregated system designs.” Partha has been a leading advocate for new system designs to improve energy efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO) in large-scale datacenters. The technology inflection point of the last decade (which caused power efficiency to become the dominant design constraint in computing systems), the massive growth of cloud datacenter computing, and the related power consumption and carbon footprint all underscore the importance of his work, which has had tremendous impact in both academia and industry. In his 2008 ISCA paper, Partha introduced the notion of microblade servers for warehouse-scale computing. The paper developed a benchmark suite and methodology to evaluate large-scale datacenters based on cost, performance, and power, and then used this to explore the space of processors, memory, packaging, and storage. His analysis showed that, for these cloud workloads, which are often I/O-bound, performance per dollar could be substantially improved, while still meeting service-level agreements, by using low-cost, low-power mobile processors rather than the highperformance processors traditionally used in datacenter designs. This paper also proposed novel disaggregated system architectures and packaging, in which common infrastructure is shared across compute assemblies. Partha further developed this concept in his 2009 ISCA paper on memory disaggregation, in which he showed how memory microblades permit memory capacity to be dynamically expanded and shared across compute nodes, thus reducing the overprovisioning of resources needed in conventional designs, and lowering both system cost and energy usage. His MICRO 2011 paper went on to evaluate and highlight the benefit of greater system-on-a-chip integration to improve TCO for server designs. Continuing this theme, his ASPLOS 2012 paper explored the environmental impact of building (as opposed to running) these large datacenters, and showed how low-power microblades can permit a reduction in materials and components (dematerialized server packaging) to substantially reduce this impact. Partha’s work mobilized and motivated a large group of academics within the computer architecture, operating system, and database communities to work on low-power server designs. Partha’s impact on the computing industry has arguably been even more impressive. Low-power servers based on mobile processors are now wellaccepted. Hewlett-Packard’s Project Moonshot, a major initiative to improve the energy efficiency and cost of HP’s server and datacenter designs, was directly based off of Partha’s microblade work. He was named the youngest-ever HP Fellow for his “vision and leadership in server and datacenter system architecture innovation.” His influence was not limited to his own company. Other system vendors, such as SeaMicro, Dell, and Quanta, have announced similar server designs based on low-power processors. Several large cloud companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, and Rackspace, have publicly discussed the benefits of microblade-like designs, and Facebook’s Open Compute initiative has adopted disaggregated system designs. Finally, many mobile processor vendors have now announced serverclass processors tailored for microblade designs.