Neurochips from the 90s
Neural networks are transforming AI and will impact our society in ways we can’t begin to imagine. The possibilities are endless: from autonomous vehicles to revolutionizing healthcare. The hardware industry is clearly excited about this revolution, as can be seen...
Near Data Computing from a Database Systems Perspective
The end of Dennard scaling has exposed a widening gap between the demand to process ever-growing datasets and the capability of modern computers to do so. In a quest to make data processing faster and more power-efficient, researchers are revisiting the decades-old...
Meet a Senior Architect at ISCA
Have you ever gone to an architecture conference and seen a more senior researcher in a conversation and wished you could join them? Maybe he/she is the author of an article that you found particularly interesting and would like to get a deeper insight into the work. ...
Welcome to the Women in Computer Architecture (WICARCH) community
On behalf of the Women in Computer Architecture (WICARCH) organizing committee, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new webpage and update you on some of our recent initiatives. But first some history. Female graduate students may often find themselves one of...
Why Machine Learning Needs Benchmarks
It’s a marvelous time in computer systems. For me, working in Deep Learning feels like living through a scientific revolution. Kuhn described this kind of change in his classic book, where a new paradigm takes hold, causing entire fields to change their standard...
A Brief Guide of xPU for AI Accelerators
In the workshop on Inter-Disciplinary Research Challenges in Computer Systems (Grand Challenges) co-located with ASPLOS 2018, Dr. Hillery Hunter from IBM and I co-organized a panel discussion on “Augmenting Human Abilities/AI”. During the discussion,...
A Common Standard to Fix Our Review Process (and oh, I was wrong about one thing)
We need a rubric for reviews to ensure our review process is fair.
The new life of SmartNICs
Programmable network controllers, SmartNICs, are an old concept, yet today they are seeing renewed interest and growing adoption in data centers and HPC systems. This blog post discusses the trends in modern computer networks that drive the dramatic increase of...
John Hennessy and David Patterson Share ACM Turing Award
ACM recently announced that computer scientists John Hennessy and David Patterson have shared the 2017 ACM Turing Award. This blog post (a) gives a story–necessarily oversimplified–for how Hennessy & Patterson’s work fundamentally changed and accelerated computer architecture work and (b) includes Hennessy and Patterson’s Turing Lecture abstract.