Jose-Maria Arnau

jarnau@ac.upc.edu

UPC - BarcelonaTech
C6-115 Campus Nord UPC
C\Jordi Girona 1-3
08034 Barcelona, Spain
Phone: +34 9340 54039

Find a brief CV of mine

Short Biography

I am a distinguished researcher at UPC BarcelonaTech. I work in the ARCO (ARchitectures and COmpilers) research group hosted in the Computer Architecture Department. I received BSc in Computer Engineering from the Universitat Jaume I, and MSc and Ph.D. on Computer Architecture from the UPC. My thesis was done under the supervision of Dr. Polychronis Xekalakis and Prof. Joan-Manuel Parcerisa.

Current Research

My research focuses on energy-efficient hardware architectures for cognitive computing. I work on novel techniques to improve the energy-efficiency of Domain Specific Accelerators for deep learning, considering both FPGA and ASIC solutions. My research also explores techniques to improve GPGPU architectures for graph-processing and machine learning workloads.

• Current PhD students:
• Marc Riera. Thesis title: Resilient, Low-Power Accelerators for Cognitive Computing.
• Albert Segura. Thesis title: Energy-Efficient GPU Architectures for Speech Recognition.
• Franyell Silfa. Thesis title: Energy-Efficient Architectures for Recurrent Neural Networks.
• Daniel Pinto. Thesis title: Energy-Efficient Architectures for Human-Quality Speech Recognition Systems.
• Graduated PhD students:
• Hamid Tabani. Thesis title: Low-Power Architectures for Automatic Speech Recognition. (now at BSC)
• Reza Yazdani. Thesis title: Ultra Low-Power, High Performance Accelerator for Speech Recognition.
• Current Master students:
• Raul Taranco
• David Nicuesa
• Graduated Master students:
• Azmath Syeda. Energy Efficient Accelerator for Self-Driving Cars. (now at Qualcomm)
• Berta Delgado. An Enegy-Efficient FPGA Accelerator for Convolutional Neural Networks. (now at HP)

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Conferences:

• "Neuron-Level Fuzzy Memoization in RNNs". Franyell Silfa, Gem Dot, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez. To appear in Proceedings of the 52nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), October 2019.
• "SCU: A GPU Stream Compaction Unit for Graph Processing". Albert Segura, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2019.
• "E-PUR: An Energy-Efficient Processing Unit for Recurrent Neural Networks". Franyell Silfa, Gem Dot, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), November 2018.
• "Computation Reuse in DNNs by Exploiting Input Similarity". Marc Riera, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the 45th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2018.
• "The Dark Side of DNN Pruning". Reza Yazdani Aminabadi, Marc Riera, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the 45th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2018.
• “A Novel Register Renaming Technique for Out-of-Order Processors”. Hamid Tabani, Jose-Maria Arnau, Jordi Tubella, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), February 2018.
• "UNFOLD: A Memory-Efficient Speech Recognizer Using On-The-Fly WFST Composition". Reza Yazdani Aminabadi, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), October 2017.
• "An Ultra Low-Power Hardware Accelerator for Acoustic Scoring in Speech Recognition". Hamid Tabani, Jose-Maria Arnau, Jordi Tubella, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), September 2017.
• "An Ultra Low-Power Hardware Accelerator for Automatic Speech Recognition". Reza Yazdani Aminabadi, Albert Segura, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), October 2016. PDF
• “Eliminating Redundant Fragment Shader Executions on a Mobile GPU via Hardware Memoization” . Jose-Maria Arnau, Joan-Manuel Parcerisa and Polychronis Xekalakis. In Proceedings of the 41st IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2014. PDF Slides
• “Parallel Frame Rendering: Trading Responsiveness for Energy on a Mobile GPU” . Jose-Maria Arnau, Joan-Manuel Parcerisa and Polychronis Xekalakis. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), September 2013. PDF Slides
• “TEAPOT: A Toolset for Evaluating Performance, Power and Image Quality on Mobile Graphics Systems” . Jose-Maria Arnau, Joan-Manuel Parcerisa and Polychronis Xekalakis . In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), June 2013. PDF Slides
• “Boosting Mobile GPU Performance with a Decoupled Access/Execute Fragment Processor”. Jose-Maria Arnau, Joan-Manuel Parcerisa and Polychronis Xekalakis . In Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2012. PDF Slides

Peer-Reviewed Journals:

• "A Low-Power, High-Performance Speech Recognition Accelerator". Reza Yazdani, Jose-Maria Arnau and Antonio Gonzalez. IEEE Transactions on Computers. doi: 10.1109/TC.2019.2937075
• "CGPA: Coarse-Grained Pruning of Activations for Energy-Efficient RNN Inference". Marc Riera, Jose-Maria Arnau and Antonio Gonzalez. IEEE Micro. doi: 10.1109/MM.2019.2929742
• "Performance Analysis and Optimization of Automatic Speech Recognition". Hamid Tabani, Jose-Maria Arnau, Jordi Tubella and Antonio Gonzalez. IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems (TMSCS), vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 847-860, 2018.
• "Low-Power Automatic Speech Recognition Through a Mobile GPU and a Viterbi Accelerator". Reza Yazdani, Albert Segura, Jose-Maria Arnau and Antonio Gonzalez. IEEE Micro, vol. 37, no. 1, 2017, pp. 22-29.
• “Study of the Pressing Operation of Large-sized Tiles Using X-ray Absorption”. J.L. Amoros, G. Mallol, D. Llorens, J. Boix, J.M. Arnau, C.Feliu, J.A. Cerisuelo and J.J. Gargallo. Journal of the Spanish Ceramic and Glass Society, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 279-288, 2010.
• “Apparent Density Measurement of the Ceramic Tiles in a Quick, Harmless and Non-destructive Way”. G. Mallol, D. Llorens, J. Boix, M. Aguilella, L. Foucard and J.M. Arnau. Journal of the Spanish Ceramic and Glass Society, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 393-398, 2010.

Past Research

My past research focused on energy-efficient architectures for mobile GPUs:

• Thesis: Energy-Efficient Mobile GPU Systems
• Master Thesis: High Performance, Ultra-Low Power Streaming Systems

Lectures

• Computer Organization, BSc. Degree on Computer Engineering, UPC
• Processor Design, Master MIRI, UPC
• Nanoelectronic Circuit Design, Master MIRI, UPC