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Systems 2030: The Extended Reality Case

Sarita Adve (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Distinguished Lecture Series

Thursday, February 11, 2021, 3:30 pm

Zoom Meeting

Abstract

Sarita Adve

The end of Dennard scaling and Moore's law is leading to domain-specific heterogeneous systems. There is an accompanying explosion of applications deployed on heterogeneous edge devices that interface directly with the end-user. Realizing the full potential of these trends requires changing how we conduct systems research.

To drive the technologies to enable domain-specific edge systems of 2030, my group has been working in the domain of extended reality (XR), including virtual and augmented reality. XR has the potential to transform our lives, but there is an orders of magnitude performance-power-quality gap between what is achievable today and our ideal XR systems.

We recently released ILLIXR –- Illinois Extended Reality tested –- the first open source XR system and testbed for XR systems research. Building ILLIXR has taught us that the systems of 2030 require researchers to learn how to do application-driven, end-to-end quality-of-experience driven, and hardware-software-application co-designed systems research. This is hard, but fun. I will share the pain and the joy of doing such research and our results and implications for both XR and systems research.

Bio

Sarita V. Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests span the system stack, ranging from hardware to applications. She co-developed the memory models for the C++ and Java programming languages based on her early work on data-race-free models. She is also known for her work on heterogeneous systems and software-driven approaches for hardware resiliency. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy award, the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award in innovation, the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, and the University of Illinois campus award for excellence in graduate student mentoring. As ACM SIGARCH chair, she co-founded the CARES movement, winner of the CRA distinguished service award, to address discrimination and harassment in Computer Science research events. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.