The Energy Challenge of Immersive Computing

Abstract: Computing is on the brink of a new immersive era. Recent innovations in virtual/augmented/mixed reality (extended reality or XR) show the potential for a new immersive modality of computing that will transform most industries and human activities and change how we design and use computers.  There is, however, an orders of magnitude gap between the power/performance/quality-of-experience (QoE) attributes of current and desirable immersive systems. On the one hand, we see huge societal benefits from the vision of systems that provide comfortable, mobile, all day, trustworthy, rich immersive experiences. On the other hand, this vision also entails each user’s compute device seeking to seamlessly integrate virtual experiences with the physical world, continuously reconstructing, understanding, augmenting, and interacting with the world around them. The computation required is insatiable and will need to be supported by edge and cloud data centers.  Providing this level of compute in a sustainable and energy-responsible manner will require codesign across the device-edge-cloud and across hardware-runtimes-network-AI models. I will discuss our recent work pursuing such an agenda, as part of the IMMERSE Center for Immersive Computing, the Illinois Extended Reality (IILIXR) testbed, and in collaboration with Prof. Brighten Godfrey, Prof. Shenlong Wang, our industry partners, and our students.

Bio: Sarita 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 directs IMMERSE, Center for Immersive Computing, which brings together expertise in immersive technologies, applications, and human experience to perform research, educate a new workforce, and build infrastructure to enable a new era of immersive computing. Her group released ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality testbed), an open-source end-to-end extended reality system and research testbed, to democratize XR research, development, and benchmarking. Her work on data-race-free, C++, and Java memory consistency models forms the foundation for memory models used in most hardware and software systems today.  She is also known for her work on heterogeneous architectures and software-driven hardware resiliency. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, a recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy award, the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, and the IIT-Bombay Distinguished Alumnus/Alumna award. 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.