by Mark D. Hill on Mar 25, 2019 | Tags: Architecture, Methodology
With two blog posts, we argue for more use of simple models beyond Amdahl’s Law. Part 1 previously discussed Bottleneck Analysis and Little’s Law, while this post (Part 2) presents the M/M/1 Queue.
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by Ulya Karpuzc on Mar 21, 2019 | Tags: Conference
HPCA celebrated its 25th anniversary this year with significant participation of over 300 attendees! It was held in Washington D.C., USA between February 16-20. Accelerators was a bigger theme this year (not only for ML but covering a broader range of domains...
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by Mark D. Hill on Mar 18, 2019 | Tags: Architecture, Methodology
With two blog posts, we argue for more use of simple models beyond Amdahl’s Law. This Part 1 discusses Bottleneck Analysis and Little’s Law, while Part 2 presents the M/M/1 Queue. Computer systems, from the Internet-of-Things devices to datacenters, are complex and...
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by Swapnil Haria on Mar 5, 2019 | Tags: Advice
I have been fortunate enough to have many helpful senior students and two wonderful advisors to learn from throughout my PhD. Now as a senior PhD student myself, I have identified some lessons that proved most valuable as well as common mistakes made by younger...
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by Mark Silberstein on Feb 26, 2019 | Tags: Advice, Opinion
Modern academic culture is founded on perpetual evaluation and relentless ranking of researchers and their results. Obtaining competitive research funds and publishing in top-tier venues are prerequisites to a successful career. Unfortunately, as was shown by several...
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by Spyros Blanas on Feb 18, 2019 | Tags: data-centric computing, Databases
Previous posts in the Computer Architecture Today series have explored how the broader adoption of smart NICs is providing applications a mechanism to push computation closer to the data and inside the network stack to hide the latency of accessing remote memory in a...
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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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