I am running for Chair of TCuARCH because I have been part of the microarchitecture community for 32 years, appreciate greatly all the good that TCuARCH has done during that period, but recognize there is still much work to be done, and would like to lead it.
TCuARCH, together with SIGMICRO, has been at the forefront of launching and improving conferences for decades. Since its inception in 1967, MICRO has evolved from a workshop on microprogramming to a major international conference where microarchitecture and compiler researchers attended each other’s sessions before hardware-software co-design became a buzzword. In 2003, TCuARCH helped launch CGO, a unique forum dedicated to researchers working on compile-time and run-time code generation and optimizations that are close to the hardware. More recently, MICRO led the broader computer architecture community in several ways: providing program committee discussion summaries to paper authors, the lightning session, and the revision process. Many of these have been or are being adopted by ISCA, ASPLOS, and HPCA.
Over the years, TCuARCH has refrained from over-burdening MICRO with rules and helped MICRO organizers to experiment with various new directions. In 1992, the MICRO steering committee appointed me, then a newly tenured associate professor, to chair the organization committee and the program committee. Many senior people in the community worked with me to officially transition MICRO into a full-scale conference with broader inclusion of the instruction-level parallelism researchers. The philosophy of innovation and empowerment has paid off. MICRO has been consistently growing. In 2017, MICRO had a record number of submissions and the highest attendance ever.
If I am elected TCuARCH chair, I will focus my efforts on three key issues.
- I will work with the MICRO Steering Committee and Organizing Committees to develop new mechanisms, employ appropriate technology, and try out new ideas to make the review process even more transparent and more fair, improve the accountability of the reviewers, recognize good reviewers, and through this, try to ensure that the conference is accepting the best papers to improve the field.
- I will further improve the diversity of the community by providing TCuARCH support for people from many different intellectual, geographical, gender, and social backgrounds and people with different constraints. For example, I will work to provide better accommodation for participants with disabilities, enable child care during meetings, run workshops that help first-time attendees get familiarized with the review process, and help students to explore various career opportunities.
- I will increase the global reach of TCuARCH by making it more inclusive and representative of the broad microarchitecture community. I will encourage contributions from many countries of the world, renew and diversify the TCuARCH/MICRO management with contributors that care about the conferences such that the community becomes stronger while preserving its innovative spirit.
Some have proposed to disband TCuARCH and merge MICRO/CGO into the TCCA portfolio. I have served as general chair and program chair of both ISCA and MICRO. After carefully considering their proposal, I have concluded that disbanding TCuARCH and putting both ISCA and MICRO in the hands of the same organizations will weaken our community by eliminating an important venue of innovation. Furthermore, starting this year, individual IEEE Technical Committees will have their own financial reserves. Disbanding TCuARCH will necessarily reduce the level of such funds available to our community and make the broader community weaker, not stronger.
As a long-time member of the MICRO/TCuARCH community who has published 30 papers in MICRO over the years and cares deeply about the future of our community, I would like to have the opportunity to work with all of you to bring our community to the next level. I strongly believe that we grow stronger by preserving and growing the innovative spirit of our community as we address the opportunities and challenges we are facing. I ask for your support.
When to vote:
The election starts on Jan 8 and ends on Jan 26.
How to vote:
You will get a ballot in the email, if you are already a TcuARCH member at the time the election starts. If you do not, or if you become a member after the election starts, the ballot link can be forwarded to you by someone who received the ballot. I have also included a ballot below. By clicking on the forwarded link, you can exercise your vote.
About the Author: Prof. Wen-mei W. Hwu holds the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Dear IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Microprogramming and Microarchitecture (TCuARCH) Members,
The TCuARCH Chair election is now open. The Chair’s term will run from February 1, 2018 through January 31, 2020.
The election poll will close January 26 at 5:00pm Pacific Time.
Before entering the poll, please take a few moments to review candidate Biosketches and Position Statements, which can be found here:
http://www.computer.org/web/tandc/tcuarch
**Please note: Only CS Members who are also TCuARCH Members are eligible to vote. ** To cast your vote, you will need your IEEE CS Member number. To obtain a misplaced number, please visit:
*To ensure your CS and TCuARCH memberships are valid and up to date, please log in to your IEEE Web Account and check your membership status: https://www.ieee.org/profile/public/login/publiclogin.html
You may vote only one time.
VOTE here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Z33Q2HB
If you have trouble voting, please contact Brookes Little (eblittle@computer.org), Senior Manager, Communities & Technical Activities.
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Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the Computer Architecture Today blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGARCH or its parent organization, ACM.
