by Emery Berger on May 10, 2022 | Tags: Accelerators, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies
INTEL LAUNCHES NEW BITCOIN MINING CHIP, BLOCKSCALE Intel’s new bitcoin mining chip, the Intel Blockscale ASIC, will ship in Q3 2022 to select customers. (Bitcoin Magazine, April 2022) STOP! Before you read even one more sentence of this article: if you are currently...
Read more...
by Richard L. Sites on May 6, 2022 | Tags: Operating Systems, Page Management, Virtual Memory
Virtual memory was invented in a time of scarcity. Is it still a good idea? — Chuck Thacker 2010 Turing Lecture It is time for the computer industry to consider larger minimum page sizes. The ~4KB page size has been around since 1962. With cell phones and even...
Read more...
by Brandon Lucia on May 3, 2022 | Tags: Edge Devices, Energy Harvesting, Satellites, Space systems
Today it is possible, with a little bit of planning and some careful preparation, to send your computer architecture research into space. We are in the early days of a new space race that is making it possible to launch things to space more easily, more cheaply, and...
Read more...
by Jung Ho Ahn on Apr 28, 2022 | Tags: Bootstrapping, Emerging Application, Homomorphic Encryption, Privacy-preserving Computing
Homomorphic encryption (HE) is an emerging, computationally intensive application for computer architects. HE allows computations on encrypted data (called ciphertexts). In the machine-learning-as-a-service era, HE is highlighted as an enabler for privacy-preserving...
Read more...
by Elaheh Sadredini and Daniel Wong on Apr 18, 2022 | Tags: Conference, Virtual Meetings
Welcome to the trip report on the 28th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA-28)! This marks the second fully-virtual HPCA (and hopefully last). With signs of the COVID-19 pandemic receding last November 2021, HPCA decided to...
Read more...
by Xiangyao Yu on Apr 13, 2022 | Tags: Cloud computing, Databases, Datacenters, Emerging Technology, Memory Disaggregation, Near Data Computing, Storage
The memory and storage hierarchy deepens in modern systems. To mitigate the low performance of memory/storage devices at the bottom of the hierarchy, near-data processing has been studied across different memory and storage devices as a means to reduce access latency...
Read more...
by Elba Garza and Abdulrahman Mahmoud on Apr 7, 2022 | Tags: ASPLOS, Conference, Conferences
Early this March, computer and systems architects from the world over gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland to attend the 27th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, or ASPLOS 2022. The first conference to go...
Read more...
by Vijay Chidambaram on Apr 4, 2022 | Tags: Conference, rebuttal, Review, Reviewing
Many CS systems and architecture conferences have a rebuttal phase or an author response period, where authors can respond to the questions asked by reviewers, and correct misunderstandings by reviewers. We discuss the pros and cons of this phase, and whether it is a...
Read more...
by Hung-Wei Tseng on Mar 9, 2022 | Tags: Accelerators, Machine Learning, ray tracing, Specialization, Tensor Processing
With Dennard scaling discontinued, application-specific hardware accelerators are ubiquitous in modern computers to offer more efficient task processing. Famous examples include Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Apple’s Neural Engines for...
Read more...
by Dmitry Ponomarev on Feb 17, 2022 | Tags: Conferences, fhe, hardware accelerator, Security
In an earlier blog post, we summarized advances in hardware and architecture security research in the early part of 2021; this post highlights contributions that appeared in the later part of 2021 that are of interest to our community. In this post, we focus on papers...
Read more...
