Special Session Paper: Data Analytics Enables Energy-Efficiency and Robustness: From Mobile to Manycores, Datacenters, and Networks

The amount of data generated and collected across computing platforms every day is not only enormous, but growing at an exponential rate. Advanced data analytics and machine-learning techniques have become increasingly essential to analyze and extract meaning from such "Big Data". These techniques can be very useful to detect patterns and trends to improve the operational behavior of computing platforms, but they also introduce a number of outstanding challenges: (1) How can we design and deploy data analytics and learning mechanisms to improve energy-efficiency in IoT and mobile devices, without introducing significant software overheads? (2) How to use machine learning and analytics techniques for effective design-space exploration during manycore chip design? (3) How can data analytics and learning improve the reliability and energy-efficiency of large-scale cloud datacenters, to cost-effectively support connected embedded and IoT platforms? (4) How can data analytics detect anomalies and increase robustness in the network backbone of emerging cloud datacenter networks? In this paper, we discuss these outstanding problems and describe far-reaching solutions applicable across the interconnected ecosystem of IoT and mobile devices, manycore chips, datacenters, and networks.