Nathan Beckmann, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, has received a five-year, roughly $500,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award for young faculty members.

Beckmann's research interests include computer architecture and performance modeling. The NSF grant will support his work crafting and evaluating a new computer system design that makes accessing data faster and cheaper. Beckmann said more energy efficiency is needed to sustain growth in computing power for machine learning, social networking and robotics.

Applications currently have no control over how data is managed because memory hierarchy is fixed in hardware and hidden from software, resulting in unnecessary data movement. Beckmann's project will develop a new hardware-software co-design, wherein the operating system and hardware will collaboratively schedule tasks and data to improve efficiency.

Beckmann will involve high school, undergraduate and graduate students in research. He will also organize research workshops for undergraduate women and a summer internship program for underrepresented minorities.

Beckman earned his master's degree and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent one year post-doc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.