Hitting an Accelerator Wall: When Specialized Chips Meet the End of Moore’s Law
Background These are exciting and challenging times for computer architects. The looming end of Moore’s law and the breakdown of Dennard scaling force everybody to put on their thinking caps and envision what future processors will look like when transistors...
Let’s Keep it to Ourselves: Don’t Disclose Vulnerabilities
There are millions of viruses, etc., in the wild today. Countless new ones are devised by black-hat hackers all the time. In order to proactively defend against new exploits, some white-hatters seek out or create weaknesses or vulnerabilities and then devise fixes for them. However, in some cases, such as Spectre, fixes are not readily apparent, either to the inventor or the vendor of the target software or hardware. Regardless of the existence of a fix or not, the question arises as to what to publicize or disclose about the vulnerability. We argue that no public disclosure should be made at all, until and unless the exploit appears in the wild.
Why the GPGPU is Less Efficient than the TPU for DNNs
The GPGPU’s massive multithreading is unnecessary for DNNs, and imposes performance, area, and energy overheads. By avoiding such multithreading, the TPU is more efficient.
The Case for Quantum Computing
In a recent IEEE Spectrum article, Mikhail Dyakonov makes The Case Against Quantum Computing, focusing on the idea that building a quantum computer would require precise control over 2300 continuous variables. This view is absolutely correct if we were building an...
The Year in Review
Beyond Vertex Programs: EDA 3.0
In the past ten years, there has been a lot of progress in the design of programming models for parallel graph algorithms and their implementation on a variety of hardware platforms including multicore CPUs and GPUs. Vertex programs for graph analytics For the most...
Expanding mentoring opportunities for Young Architects
“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could”. — Zig Ziglar, renowned motivational speaker Good mentoring can have an outsized impact on the careers of students, especially during early stages of...
The Future in Visual Computing: Research Challenges
The tremendous growth in visual computing is fueled by the rapid increase in deployment of visual sensing (e.g. cameras) in many usages ranging from digital security/surveillance and automated retail (e.g. smart cameras & analytics) to interactive/immersive...
Want People to Read Your Paper? Consider the Worst-Case Reviewer.
Inspired by T. N. Vijaykumar’s recent (and excellent) guidance for program committee members, I wanted to share my thoughts about crafting papers to survive the reviewing process and (more important) in the real world. A research paper’s task is to convey...Subscribe
