by Vijay Nagarajan on Oct 20, 2026 | Tags: Accelerators, Coherence, memory models
When components with distinct memory models share memory, what rules govern the interface between them? Many of today’s systems already have to answer this question. On NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper, for example, an Arm CPU and a GPU share one coherent memory; the...
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by Irene Wang on Sep 17, 2026 | Tags: Conference, Mentoring, uarch, Workshop
The uArch 2026 Cohort The 8th annual Undergraduate Architecture Mentoring (uArch) Workshop took place alongside the International Symposium of Computer Architecture (ISCA) 2026, in Raleigh North Carolina. Each year, uArch introduces undergraduate and early master’s...
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by Vishakha Ramani on Sep 9, 2026 | Tags: AI coding agents, AI-native systems research, LLM serving, performance modeling, systems research methodology
Lessons from using an AI coding agent in LLM systems research This project began with a routing problem. When an LLM request arrives, the system must decide which GPU will execute prefill and which GPU will execute decode. The same GPU can execute both phases....
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by Digvijay Singh on Aug 31, 2026 | Tags: branch prediction
This is the second (and final) post in the series covering the Next Generation Branch Prediction Champtionship (CBP-NG). Part-I details the provided infrastructure and the winning submissions. Distilled Branch Predictors (Simha Sethumadhavan – Columbia...
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by Digvijay Singh on Aug 28, 2026 | Tags: branch prediction
Background The Next Generation Branch Prediction Championship (CBP-NG) aimed to address practical implementation challenges in branch prediction, moving beyond metrics used in earlier iterations. By emphasizing energy-adjusted performance—incorporating throughput,...
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by Alhad Daftardar, Brendan Sweezy, Brandon Reagen on Aug 13, 2026 | Tags: Cryptography, Emerging Applications, Privacy-preserving Computing, Security, Verifiable Computing, Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Zero-Knowledge Proofs As conversations about LLMs continue to dominate computer science, the cryptographic community has been abuzz around a different three letter acronym: ZKP. Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier that a statement is...
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by Aditya Kamath, Simon Peter on Jul 23, 2026 | Tags: Accelerators, Machine Learning
LLM execution requires moving gigabytes of data, which includes static model weights, the generated KV cache, and other intermediate representations. Depending on the deployment, this may involve communication across the network, PCIe links, accelerator links (e.g.,...
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by Vijay Janapa Reddi on Jul 13, 2026 | Tags: Benchmarks, Machine Learning, Measurements, Methodology
AI is starting to shape architectural mechanisms, workloads, and evaluation. To make sense of it, we need a compact, shared way to preserve enough of that process for other groups to evaluate and build on AI-assisted claims. At the 53rd ISCA in Raleigh, AI for...
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by Bingyao Li on Jul 10, 2026 | Tags: ISCA, Trip Report
The conference The 53rd International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) was held at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, from June 27 to July 1, 2026. Raleigh sits at one corner of the Research Triangle, anchored by North Carolina State...
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by Shanqing Lin, Mohammad Alian, Babak Falsafi on Jun 8, 2026 | Tags: Simulation
Accurate timing simulation remains one of the most important tools in computer architecture, but modern systems have made cycle-level simulation increasingly impractical. Today’s platforms combine many-core CPUs, deep memory hierarchies, accelerators, complex I/O, and...
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