Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Through our constant dedication to customer-centric innovation and strong partnerships, we have established leading end-to-end capabilities and strengths across the carrier networks, enterprise, consumer, and cloud computing fields. Our products and solutions have been deployed in over 170 countries serving more than one third of the world’s population.

With 20+ sites across Europe and 1500 researchers, Huawei’s European Research Institute (ERI) oversees fundamental and applied technology research, academic research cooperation projects, and strategic technical planning across our network of European R&D facilities. Huawei’s ERI includes the Zurich Research Center (ZRC), located in Zurich, Switzerland. A major element of ZRC is a rapidly growing research laboratory focused on fundamental research in the area of computing systems (new hardware, new software, new algorithms).

The research work of the lab will be carried out not only by Huawei’s internal research staff but also by our academic research partners in universities across Europe. The lab will provide an open research environment where academics will be encouraged to visit and work on fundamental long-term research alongside Huawei staff in an environment that, like the best universities and research institutes, is open and conducive to such world-leading scientific work.

Researcher scope: efficient instruction execution in superscalar out-of-order CPUs

Out-of-order CPU pipelines rely on complex and therefore limited resources (physical registers for example) to schedule and execute instructions in any possible order to extract more Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP). However recently the “free lunch” has finished and we see a diminishing return in CPU performance investment that stems in the end of Dennard scaling along with the slowdown in Moore’s law. Accordingly, the goal of this project is to improve silicon (resource) utilization by shortening the cycles that pipeline resources are occupied and indirectly extending the CPU reach.

A successful candidate has the unique opportunity to work on cutting edge ideas related to CPU microarchitecture that target performance improvement while keeping the energy consumption in check. Such candidate may furthermore modify current state-of-the-art industrial CPU microarchitecture and affect the future CPU products.

Responsibilities

We are looking for motivated postdoc to join our research activities and contribute in one or more of the following areas:

• Ideation for energy efficient microarchitectures targeting future CPUs.
• Workload analysis, performance tuning and profiling (e.g., using performance counters or binary instrumentation techniques)
• Modelling and evaluation of new microarchitectural features in a simulator (e.g., gem5)
• Exploring CPU pipeline bottlenecks and explore the potential of alleviating or removing them
• Publishing research papers in top-tier venues

We have plenty of exciting work and can tune the specific topic to your skills and interests. If one or more of these areas look interesting to you, we are looking forward to receiving your application!

Requirements

• Currently having a PhD in an area related to computer architecture, compilers, and/or software performance optimization
• Hands-on experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Processor microarchitecture

• Modern memory hierarchies and prefetching

• Compiler analysis and optimization

• Software performance analysis and tuning

• Strong communication skills, ability to perform and present detailed analysis of experimental results

• Strong motivation to joining a cutting-edge industrial research environment

Benefits

At the Zurich Research Center, the successful candidate becomes part of a multicultural team of leading European researchers with expertise spanning from microarchitectures to mathematics. We believe such breadth is crucial to succeed in our mission to drive new fundamental research and achieve new innovate breakthroughs in future computing systems. If this speaks to you, please be sure to apply!