by Grigori Fursin and Anton Lokhmotov on Feb 11, 2019 | Tags: Artifact Evaluation, reproducible research
We all love good ol’ architecture research! From a germ of an idea, through a thorny path of its implementation and validation, to its publication. With its publication, hopefully comes its adoption. With its adoption, grows our reputation. With our reputation, come to us many good things including fantastic colleagues and lucrative grants! Therefore, it ought to bother us a great deal when good ideas get no adoption. And that’s why we care deeply about understanding and eliminating barriers to successful adoption. In this blog post, we discuss “Artifact Evaluation” to foster wider adoption of computer architecture ideas.
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by Simha Sethumadhavan, Steven M. Bellovin, Paul Kocher, Ed Suh on Feb 7, 2019 | Tags: Opinion, Security
In a recent opinion post on security disclosures, Uht questions if the public disclosure of hardware security vulnerabilities has had any benefits, and suggests that it would be better not to disclose these vulnerabilities. As Uht points out, debate on security...
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by Adi Fuchs and David Wentzlaff on Feb 4, 2019 | Tags: Accelerators, Moore's Law, Specialization
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...
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by Gus Uht on Jan 31, 2019 | Tags: Opinion, Security
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.
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by Mithuna Thottethodi and T. N. Vijaykumar on Jan 22, 2019 | Tags: Accelerators, Machine Learning, Specialization
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.
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by Fred Chong, Ken Brown, Yongshan Ding on Jan 15, 2019 | Tags: 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...
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by Alvin Lebeck on Jan 7, 2019 | Once again the new year is upon us and it’s time to look back on 2018 and to look ahead for 2019. It was another great year for Computer Architecture Today with 59 posts, for a total of 103 published posts from 37 contributors that generated over 170,000 views...
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by Keshav Pingali on Dec 20, 2018 | Tags: circuit design tools, EDA 3.0, Graph algorithms, Parallelism
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...
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by Shaizeen Aga, Aasheesh Kolli on Dec 17, 2018 | Tags: Architecture, HPCA19, Mentoring, Networking, Workshop
“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...
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by Nilesh Jain, Omesh Tickoo, Ravi Iyer on Dec 6, 2018 | Tags: Architecture, Machine Learning, Vision
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...
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