Another year in the books.  Another year of dealing with the impact of Covid. Nearly everyone has been touched by the pandemic, and it’s worthwhile to remember this impact and be extra kind and understanding with our colleagues. While university campus life has continued to endure occasional disruptions, it’s been great to gather again in-person with students, and resume the traditions of late-night frenzied paper submissions¹Sidenote: one (unnamed) lab even managed to go an entire year without submitting a paper with inadvertent XXs..

It feels like we’re gradually emerging out of hibernation. The NYT newsletter The Morning seems to provide data every week reminding us that at this point, the seasonal flu and car rides pose more risk of death to the vaccinated than Covid (fingers crossed regarding the next variants).  Thanks for the nudge, NYT.  It’s pretty clear that students don’t need this nudge – the eagerness to attend ASPLOS in beautiful Lausanne is smash-the-ceiling high in our respective labs. Please also fill out this survey to help organizers assess plans for the in-person HPCA/CGO/PPoPP in South Korea in April.

It’s also the time of the year to make award nominations. Please consider nominating one of your many deserving colleagues for the Alan D. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award, the Maurice Wilkes Award, the Eckert-Mauchly Award, the Outstanding Dissertation Award, and the TCCA Young Computer Architect Award. 

The blog itself has had another year of riveting articles – a big thanks to the many contributors that make this happen.  We published 45 articles in 2021 involving 63+ authors.  We continue to seek article contributions to showcase a diversity of perspectives. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to the editors if you’d like to contribute an article, e.g., educating us about the landscape of problems and solutions in an emerging field.  Author guidelines can be found here.

The blog editors refresh the stable of regular contributors at the start of every year.  We have 16 new contributors (marked with a * in the list below) – welcome to the team! And five members are rotating out – thanks Mahdi Bojnordi, José F. Martínez, Michael O’Boyle, Minsoo Rhu, and Mothy Roscoe for your contributions over the last few years!

Full team of regular contributors: 

• Shaizeen Aga, AMD Research
• *Jung Ho Ahn, Seoul National University
• *Yungang Bao, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Nathan Beckmann, CMU
• Emery Berger, UMass Amherst
• *Abhishek Bhattacharjee, Yale University
• Vijay Chidambaram, University of Texas
• Fred Chong, University of Chicago
• Natalie Enright Jerger, University of Toronto
• Mingyu Gao, Tsinghua University
• Jana Giceva, Technical University of Munich
• Lisa Hsu, Microsoft
• *Koji Inoue, Kyushu University
• *Stefanos Kaxiras, Uppsala University
• Brandon Lucia, CMU
• *Divya Mahajan, Microsoft Research
• *Jayashree Mohan, Microsoft Research
• *Biswabandan Panda, IIT Bombay
• *Gennady Pekhimenko, University of Toronto
• Dmitry Ponomarev, Binghamton University 
• Tim Rogers, Purdue University
• *Eric Rotenberg, North Carolina State University
• *Richard L. Sites, Retired (most recently with Google)
• Phillip Stanley-Marbell, University of Cambridge
• *Swamit Tannu, University of Wisconsin
• Caroline Trippel, Stanford University
• *Neeraja Yadwadkar, University of Texas
• *Mengjia Yan, MIT
• *Xiangyao Yu, University of Wisconsin
• Cliff Young, Google
• *Jishen Zhao, UCSD
• Yuhao Zhu, University of Rochester

Wishing everyone good health, and hope to see many of you at conferences this year. 🤞

About the Authors: Rajeev Balasubramonian is CAT Editor and Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah.  Christina Delimitrou is CAT Associate Editor and Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University.

Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the Computer Architecture Today blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGARCH or its parent organization, ACM.

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  Sidenote: one (unnamed) lab even managed to go an entire year without submitting a paper with inadvertent XXs.