by Cliff Young on Jun 15, 2021 | Tags: Hardware, history
This is the second part of my “Brief and Biased History of Computer Architecture”; you can find the first part here. While IBM rules the 1960s and the 360/91 might be considered the first supercomputer1My definition of a supercomputer is a system that prioritizes...
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by Cliff Young on Jun 10, 2021 | Tags: Hardware, history
I’ve always envied my Physics colleagues, because their field has a history rich with heroes and epic stories1I have other reasons for Physics envy—it’s the hardest of the “hard sciences”, one step away from the pure rigor of Mathematics. I worry that CS needs...
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by Mingyu Gao on Jun 7, 2021 | Tags: Accelerators, Cryptography, MPC, Security
Big Data and artificial intelligence have empowered the data-driven computing paradigm, in which data become the most precious resources. Specifically, if one could make use of data not only of herself, but also from other sources to constitute larger datasets, it...
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by The Computer Architecture Student Association (CASA) on Jun 4, 2021 | Tags: Academia, CASA, Community, Diversity
Across the computer systems and architecture community there has been A Call to Action to advance and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values through systemic change. Towards this step, HPCA 2021, PPoPP 2021, CGO 2021, and CC 2021 held a joint session...
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by Natalie Enright Jerger on Jun 2, 2021 | Tags: Accelerators, Emerging Technology, networks-on-chip
Twenty years ago research into networks-on-chip (NoCs) was launched with the publication of the foundational Dally and Towles paper, “Route Packets not Wires,” in the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June 2001. In this blog post, I explore the evolution of...
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by Phillip Stanley-Marbell on May 13, 2021 | Tags: Approximate Computing, Sensors, Uncertainty
Uncertainty in Computation and Its Relevance to Computer Architecture I have recently been thinking about uncertainty in general and uncertainty in computations in particular. It got me thinking about several questions: can uncertainty in computations be exposed above...
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by Jakub Szefer on May 11, 2021 | Tags: Cloud computing, FPGA, Security
FPGAs in Cloud Computing The availability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in cloud datacenters has opened up new ways to improve application performance by letting users write their own custom hardware accelerators that they can realize on the FPGAs....
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by Ananth Krishna Prasad and Mahdi Nazm Bojnordi on May 7, 2021 | Tags: Accelerators, Emerging Technology, Machine Learning, Optical
In a previous blog post, we summarized some advances in optical computing that enable the implementation of low-energy optical-convolutional layers using phase masks and angle-sensitive pixels. Such approaches also present multiple challenges, such as lack of...
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by Daniel A. Jiménez, Moin Qureshi, Boris Grot, and José Martínez on May 4, 2021 | Tags: Conference, Policy, Reviewing
As with all scientific communities, the field of computer architecture is driven by publications. At the heart of a meaningful scientific publication model is a fair and sound peer-reviewing process. If this process is compromised, some papers might be unfairly...
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by Alexandros Daglis on Apr 27, 2021 | Tags: ASPLOS, Conference, virtual conferences
ASPLOS is the first major conference in our community that was held virtually for a second time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. With a whole year to prepare and adapt to the reality of online conferences, ASPLOS-XXVI lived up to the challenge,...
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