Welcome to the trip report on the 28th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA-28)! This marks the second fully-virtual HPCA (and hopefully last). With signs of the COVID-19 pandemic receding last November 2021, HPCA decided to move to April 2022 with the goal of an in-person conference. Unfortunately, the only thing predictable about COVID-19 is its unpredictability. For the second time in a row, General Chairs Jung Ho Ahn and John Kim worked tirelessly to organize another successful fully-virtual HPCA. HPCA-28 was hosted on Whova and Gather.Town, drawing in more than 1,255 attendees from 40 countries.
This year’s Program Chair, Stefanos Kaxiras, put together an exciting program. HPCA-28 received 273 submissions with 80 papers accepted (29% acceptance rate) and is the largest HPCA ever! In addition, this year’s HPCA was the first to adopt artifact evaluation, following the trend from prior computer architecture and systems conferences to improve reproducibility in the community. This year’s program consisted of 3 keynotes (joint with PPoPP and CGO), 2 tutorials, 2 workshops, 24 paper sessions, and an awards ceremony.
Main Program
In total, the main program contained 80 papers for the main track, 5 papers in the Industrial session, and 3 presentations in Best of CAL. This was organized into 24 paper sessions across 3 parallel tracks. Roughly a third of the program’s papers focused on accelerators, another third on traditional topics (microarch, caches, at scale computing, NoCs, simulation, etc.), and the remaining on quantum, security, and memory.
Following a much needed trend in other systems and computer architecture conferences, this marks the first time HPCA carried out Artifact Evaluation (AE) led by Alberto Ros and Tushar Krishna. 41.8% of submitted papers indicated interest in AE and 16.25% of accepted papers submitted to AE, with almost all papers receiving all three badges. We hope to see more members of the community participate in artifact evaluation in the future!
Best Paper Session
For the Best Paper Award, four papers were nominated. Vignesh Balaji, a research scientist at NVIDIA, presented “Improving Locality of Irregular Updates with Hardware Assisted Propagation Blocking“. The second talk “Effective Mimicry of Belady’s MIN Policy” was brought up by Ishan Shah, an undergraduate student from the University of Texas at Austin. Zhi-Gang Liu, a principal research engineer at ARM, presented his work “S2TA: Exploiting Structured Sparsity for Energy-Efficient Mobile CNN Acceleration” in collaboration with the University of Rochester. The final and fourth paper, “SupermarQ: A Scalable Quantum Benchmark Suite”, was presented by Teague Tomesh, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.
Keynotes
Carrying the tradition of past HPCA/PPoPP/CGO offerings, there were three provoking inter-disciplinary keynotes organized by each conference.
The first keynote (PPoPP) was by James Reinders, an engineer at Intel who focused on enabling parallel programming for heterogeneous computing systems. He highlighted the challenges of increasingly diverse heterogeneous systems and the difficulty in programming them effectively. He then highlighted current efforts to reign in the complexity of programming heterogeneous systems, such as the oneAPI initiative to standardize the programming of accelerated processing units (XPUs) and the SYCL Data Parallel Language. To fully meet the programmability challenges of future heterogeneous systems, James made a call to the community to come together and create an open, multi-vendor, multi-architecture, multi-language future to tackle the many challenges for effective programming of heterogeneous systems.
The second keynote (CGO) was by Saman Amarasinghe, a Professor in EECS at MIT and a member of CSAIL. Over the past 30 years, there have been unprecedented advances in algorithms, systems, and program structure…however, compilers are largely still structurally the same. Saman presented a vision for Compiler2.0, in order to inspire the compiler community to radically rethink how to build next-generation compilers and bring compiler technology to the 21st century. He then presented several possible examples of how to automate compiler construction, build Compilers as a Service, and use machine learning for cost modeling and program representation.
The third keynote (HPCA) was by Babak Falsafi, a Professor and the founding director of EcoCloud at EPFL. He first presented an overview of the modern server blade and highlighted how many aspects of modern servers are primarily derived from CPU-centric desktop PCs of the 80s. He then presented a vision for a clean-slate approach to designing servers based on three pillars—Integration, Specialization, and Approximation—to enable scalable servers in the post-Moore era.
Workshops and Tutorials
On the first weekend of April, there was a workshop and a tutorial each day. Our old friends, DOSSA and CogArch, showed up as in previous years. This year’s topic of DOSSA was “HW/SW Components for Domain Specific Systems”, while CogArch focused on the security and data-privacy preserving aspects of AI/ML and related application domains. The first tutorial came from IBM and provided detailed guidance on using the public cloud for HPC workloads. The other tutorial hoped to deliver a good sense of ML benchmarking through talks by industry and academic experts.
Awards
The award ceremony was held on Wednesday. The program chair Stefanos Kaxiras from Uppsala University opened the event with a summary of the technical program. Then Antonio Gonzalez from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya announced the 10 members of the HPCA Hall of Fame for 2022, which are Lieven Eeckhout (Ghent University), Tushar Krishna (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hsien-Hsin S. Lee (Meta), Mike O’Connor (NVIDIA), Daniel J. Sorin (Duke University), G. Edward Suh (Cornell University / Meta), Guangyu Sun (Peking University), Carole-Jean Wu (Meta), Lixin Zhang (Freelance), Huiyang Zhou (North Carolina State University). Congratulations!
The Distinguished Artifact Awards are presented to two groups – Ji Liu, Peiyi Li, Huiyang Zhou for “Not All SWAPs Have the Same Cost: A Case for Optimization-Aware Qubit routing“, and Zhaoying Li, Dan Wu, Dhananjaya Wijerathne, Tulika Mitra for “LISA: Graph Neural Network Based Portable Mapping on Spatial Accelerators”.
Finally, after the review of the Best Paper Committee, the Best Paper Award went to “SupermarQ: A Scalable Quantum Benchmark Suite” by Teague Tomesh, Pranav Gokhale, Victory Omole, Gokul Subramanian Ravi, Kaitlin N. Smith, Joshua Viszlai, Xin-Chuan Wu, Nikos Hardavellas, Margaret Martonosi, Frederic T. Chong.
Business Meeting
The business meeting covered updates and statistics from IEEE CS TCCA, CASA, and the organizing committee. This year IEEE CS TCCA started a Share Your Resume website where graduate students and postdocs can upload CVs to publicize availability for part-time and full-time jobs. This is available at http://ieeetcca.org/share-your-resume/.
Elba Garza and Emily Ruppel also presented updates from CASA, highlighting many upcoming events, such as the DEI Summer Reading Group (Summer 2022), Academic Mental Health Workshop (Fall 2022), and Jobs Workshop (Fall 2022). A newer initiative that CASA is building is CALM, a long-term mentoring program for computer architecture. After a successful pilot program, CALM will be scaling up this summer. If you are interested in participating as a mentor or mentee, visit http://comparchmentoring.org/.
Finally, the locations for the next HPCA/PPoPP/CGO/CC will be Montreal in 2023 and Edinburgh in 2024, with both planning for an in-person event.
Acknowledgment:
We would like to thank our amazing PhD students, Jingyao Zhang and Nafis Mustakin, for helping us cover all the exciting events happening at HPCA 2022. Both of them attended various sessions and helped us write the article.
About the Authors:
Elaheh Sadredini is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests lie at the intersection of computer architecture and security.
Daniel Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include energy-efficient computing, data center architectures, and GPGPUs.
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.
