Ji Kim, a recent CSL graduate, has won the ECE Outstanding PhD Thesis Award for his thesis titled “Software/Hardware Co-Design to Improve Productivity, Portability, and Performance of Loop-Task Parallel Applications.”
Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering recently announced two co-winners of the 2017 ECE Outstanding Thesis Research Award, Ibrahim Issa and Ji Kim. Ji Kim joined Prof. Christopher Batten’s research group in 2010 and was a member of the Computer Systems Laboratory until defending his doctoral thesis this past fall.
Kim uses a vertically integrated research methodology to rethink both the software and hardware in future computing systems. More specifically, he has focused on new computer chip designs that are specialized for specific classes of applications. “Software developers want to use specialized hardware to improve performance and efficiency, but they do not want to rewrite their application from scratch,” Kim said.
His thesis proposes a new approach that enables developers to begin with a standard task-parallel application for multicore processors, and then to automatically map this application to a novel loop-task accelerator platform. This new platform can potentially improve the programmability, portability, and performance of an important class of emerging applications.
Kim received his Ph.D. from Cornell Engineering in 2016, and he is now a hardware engineer at Google. He was awarded the ECE Director’s PhD TA Award (2012), an NDSEG Fellowship (2012-2015), and a Cornell University Fellowship (2010). He received both his BSE and MSE from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010.
