Hello 

It is my great pleasure to host Prof. Nikhil Shukla (University of Virginia) for his talk in the ECE Seminar Series. The details are below and attached.  Hope to see you in the seminar.

Thanks 

Sumeet

When: February 18, 2021 (Thursday), 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (ET)

Where: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/3164232249


Title:  Solving combinatorial optimization using oscillator-based dynamical systems


Abstract: Modern information processing relies largely on digital computers. However, a large class of combinatorial optimization problems, with extensive practical applications, are still considered intractable to solve on a traditional digital platform. Solving such problems typically entails exponentially increasing computing resources (time, memory etc.) as the problem sizes increase, and practical problems become unmanageable without the use of enormous, energy-guzzling computing resources. Consequently, overcoming this limitation has motivated the quest to find efficient beyond-digital computing fabrics. In this talk, I will describe one such potentially promising paradigm based on analog dynamical systems of electronic oscillators.

The talk will first explore how oscillator systems and their dynamics can be engineered to solve different computational models, relevant to computing various flavors of combinatorial optimization problems. Along this direction, I will describe some of our recent results on solving problems such as Maximum Cut, Maximum Independent Set, and Satisfiability using oscillator networks. Subsequently, I will explore CMOS and beyond-CMOS hardware fabrics that can facilitate the energy- and area-efficient implementation of the oscillator hardware platform. Finally, I will address some of the current challenges and performance trade-offs of this paradigm, and describe possible pathways to overcoming them.


Speaker Bio: Nikhil Shukla is currently an assistant professor at the University of Virginia with a joint appointment in the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and the department of Materials Science and Engineering. He received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2017. Nikhil’s research interests lie in co-designing new devices, circuits, and computational models to make computing more efficient. He has authored/co-authored over 50 journal and conference papers and has received the best paper award from IEEE TMSCS in 2017. He has also served on the technical program committee for Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2020 and 2021.