by Yuan Xie on Jun 19, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Emerging Technology, Memory, Performance, Systems
(This blog is written to celebrate the two-year anniversary for the worlds’ first commercial processor with die-stacking technology, which was released on 6/16/2015, as AMD Fury X GPU) Many of you who attended MICRO 2013 may still remember the keynote speech...
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by Srilatha Manne on Jun 8, 2017 | Tags: Accelerators, Architecture, Hardware, Industry
All hardware companies face a conundrum. Should they build a riskier product that has a higher probability of failure, or should they continue the evolutionary trend of their current products? The safe thing to do, and one that many customers may ask for, is the...
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by Simha Sethumadhavan on Jun 2, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Hardware, Policy, Security
What should vendors do when they discover that a hardware 0-day has been used to exploit systems built on their product? Some vulnerabilities may permit vendors to patch the vulnerability using microcode updates. For instance, a mitigation for the row hammer DRAM...
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by Simha Sethumadhavan on Jun 1, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Hardware, Policy, Security
What should academics do if they come across a hardware 0-day attack? Obviously, disseminate. But before the vulnerability is made public, it is important to responsibly disclose the vulnerability to the vendor to give them a chance to fix it. If the vendor determines...
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by Simha Sethumadhavan on May 31, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Hardware, Policy, Security
What should governments do when they discover a hardware 0-day? In the US, as a matter of policy, any vulnerability that is deemed to affect critical infrastructure is disclosed to the vendors by the government [VEP]. The government can hide vulnerabilities (and...
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by Simha Sethumadhavan on May 25, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Hardware, Policy, Security
[Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a series of micro-blogs over four consecutive days.] 0-day security exploits are attacks that use vulnerabilities that are unknown to a vendor. They are referred to as 0-days because the vendor knows about them for zero...
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by Abhishek Bhattacharjee on May 22, 2017 | Tags: Systems, Virtual Memory
As computer architects, one of our key tasks is to propose abstractions that improve system programmability in a manner that stands the test of time. One such abstraction, that has been crucial to the success of computing, is the concept of virtual memory. In this...
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by Mark Silberstein on May 18, 2017 | Tags: Accelerators, Databases, Networking, Programmability, specialization
In this blogpost I share what I learned at the Seventh Workshop on Multi-core and Rack-scale Systems (MaRS) co-located with the EuroSYS Conference on Computer Systems held in Belgrade in April. It is a small but vigorous interdisciplinary workshop that focuses on the...
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by Reetuparna Das on May 8, 2017 | Tags: Accelerators, Cache, Memory, Near Data Computing, specialization
Computer designers have traditionally separated the role of storage and computation. Memories stored data. Processors computed them. Is this distinction necessary? A human brain doesn’t separate the two so distinctly, so why should a computer? Before I address this...
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by Suchakrapani Sharma on May 1, 2017 | Tags: Debugging, Performance
To a developer, debugging, profiling and tracing tools are akin to the tools that a craftsman carries in a belt on construction sites. In fact, constructing robust code is as important as observing how it behaves during actual execution on production hardware....
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