ISCA 2024 that recently concluded in Buenos Aires was a historic event. For the first time in its 50+ years of existence, ISCA was organized in Latin America. The conference organizers, led by general chairs (GCs) Augusto Vega and Esteban Mocskos, worked diligently to support the functioning of the conference despite challenges in preparation, including the uncertain economic climate in Argentina, and put together a memorable conference.
Historical Perspective
ISCA 2024’s journey began ten years ago at ISCA 2014 with the GCs first bid to bring ISCA to Buenos Aires. Though the bid for ISCA 2016 went to Seoul, Augusto and Esteban persisted, securing Buenos Aires for ISCA 2022. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was further delayed, before it finally fructified in 2024. In Augusto’s words, “The decision to host ISCA in Latin America was not arbitrary; it reflects the burgeoning momentum in computer science in this region. Over the past decade, the number of computer science graduates in Latin America has risen by over 50%. Despite economic challenges, many Latin American students attended ISCA for the first time this year, connecting with global peers and learning from leading experts. We hope they become a growing part of the ISCA community in future years.”
Main Conference
The conference had a rich and diverse technical program put together by the program chairs (Sandhya Dwarkadas and Rajeev Balasubramonian). It consisted of 3 days of technical programming including 83 technical papers (over 19 sessions) covering traditional areas like microarchitecture, parallel architectures, 5 sessions on accelerators for ML and emerging areas, and other areas like security, quantum computing, near data processing, etc. Of these, 32 papers also had their artifacts evaluated successfully. The best paper session had 6 amazing candidates, and the industry session had 4 industry track papers from Intel, AMD, Samsung and Furiosa AI. The technical program included 3 keynotes and a panel discussion on sustainability.
Overall, the conference had an attendance of 413 registrants as of the last day of the conference, with 79 (19%) being students. Of all the attendees, 29 (7%) were from South America, a big increase compared to prior years, highlighting that the computer architecture community is becoming more diverse and growing in new geographies!. The conference also showcased the rich Argentinian culture, with a fantastic tango show and gala dinner at Tango Porteño, one of Argentina’s most renowned tango venues.
Workshops and Tutorials
Preceding the main conference, ISCA 2024 kicked off with two packed days of workshops and tutorials over the weekend, organized by Tutorials and Workshops Chairs José Joao and Osman Unsal. There were no fewer than 10 workshops and 12 tutorials over the two days.
On Saturday, the tutorials included gem5, simulation framework for heterogeneous systems, GeneSys AI acceleration framework, classical infrastructure for quantum computers (I2Q), memory-centric computing, and AI-centric heterogeneous SoCs (EPOCHS). Concurrently, the workshops covered open-source architectures (OSCAR), AI for chip design (AI4FACD), ML for architectures and systems (MLArchSys), vision and graphics architectures (EVGA), and DRAM Security (DRAMSec).
On Sunday, the 5th Undergraduate Architecture Mentoring Workshop (uArch) introduced undergraduate and masters students to computer architecture research while coaching them on navigating graduate school. Other tutorials included using AMD’s Ryzen AI NPUs, processing using memory (PUMPS), agile chip design, FPGA-based emulation (REMU), RISC-V instruction development, and AI compilers. The workshops focused on addressing computational needs of LLMs and GNNs (ARC-LG), cognitive architectures (CogArch), visual computing (SAVC), multi-modal computing (AOMC), and domain specific architectures (DOSSA).
Awards
The ISCA awards banquet on Tuesday unveiled a number of highly-anticipated awards. The ISCA Influential Paper Award went to “Exploiting ILP, TLP, and DLP with the polymorphous TRIPS architecture” by Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Ramadass Nagarajan, Haiming Liu, Changkyu Kim, Jaehyuk Huh, Doug Burger, Stephen W. Keckler, and Charles R. Moore, from ISCA’03. The Young Architect Award was awarded to two recipients, Prashant Nair, and Mengjia Yan. The Outstanding Dissertation Award went to Tanvir Khan, with an Honorable Mention to Poulami Das. Timothy Pinkston received the Alan D. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to the computer architecture community, and his leadership at NSF, ACM and in broadening participation. Wen-mei Hwu received the Eckert-Mauchly Award for foundational contributions to the design of processor architectures and Reetuparna Das received the Maurice Wilkes Award, for contributions to in-memory computing.
This year, the ISCA Best-Paper session had 6 nominees, covering a diverse set of topics, including safely eliminating load execution for performance and efficiency, mitigating quantum gate and measurement errors, efficient LLM inference with phase splitting, uncovering DRAM sense amplifiers using IC imaging, attaining bounds for data movement in tensor algorithms, and efficient architectures for autonomous systems. The Best Paper Award ultimately went to “Constable: Improving Performance and Power Efficiency by Safely Eliminating Load Execution” by Bera, Ranganathan, Rakshit, Mahto, Nori, Gaur, Olgun, Kanellopoulos, Sadrosadati, Subramoney, and Mutlu.
Distinguished Artifact Awards were awarded to 4 ISCA papers, namely, “Tetris: A Compilation Framework for VQA Applications in Quantum Computing” by Jin et al., “FireAxe: Partitioned FPGA-Accelerated Simulation of Large-Scale RTL Designs” by Whangbo et al., “DaCapo: Accelerating Continuous Learning in Autonomous Systems for Video Analytics” by Kim et al., and “The Dataflow Abstract Machine Simulator Framework” by Zhang et al.
Keynotes and Panel
The conference had three keynotes, on topics ranging from high performance computing, trustworthy computing, to robotics. The first, on Monday, was by Mateo Valero (Director, Barcelona Supercomputing Center), on how decades of research on SIMD, Vector Architectures and GPU-based computing are paying dividends today in satisfying the computing needs of high performance computing and AI. The Tuesday keynote was by Sridhar Iyengar (VP, Intel Labs), where he discussed the key challenges in trustworthy hardware and systems, including enhancing privacy with encrypted data processing, hardware support for post-quantum cryptography, and trustworthy AI. The Wednesday keynote was by Vivienne Sze (Professor, MIT), where she highlighted how advances in algorithm and hardware together have the potential to enable both performance and efficiency in AI and Robotics.
The Tuesday Panel on the topic of Designing Computing Systems for Sustainability, moderated by Carole-Jean Wu (Meta), had panelists Tamar Eilam (IBM Research), Babak Falsafi (EPFL), Gage Hills (Harvard University), Bobbie Manne (AMD) highlight the need to reduce embodied and operational carbon in computing, through a focus on efficiency through the computing lifecycle and developing tools to quantify the environmental impact of computing.
Business Meeting
The program committee accepted 83 out of 423 submissions (19.6% acceptance rate), with the number of submissions growing 12% year-on-year. This was the first year that ISCA had 12 area chairs assigned to oversee the discussions among the 155 member PC and 147 member ERC, and ensure high quality reviews from the committees. The PC meetings involved area-wise discussions spread across a week, to encourage high quality deliberation committee-wide. Other announcements at the business meeting included an update to the criteria for the Influential ISCA Paper Award, bringing the timeline for eligibility of candidates in line with similar Test of Time awards at MICRO and HPCA. ISCA 2025 was announced for June 21 – 25, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.
Acknowledgment: We thank Augusto Vega for sharing the historical perspective behind ISCA’24 being hosted in Buenos Aires.
About the Author: Gururaj Saileshwar is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto. His research is in secure computer architecture and systems, and focuses on side-channel attacks, transient execution attacks, and Rowhammer attacks. He develops new micro-architectural attacks and defenses, and tools to reason about security of micro-architectural designs.
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.
