


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.

Remembering Burton Smith
Burton Smith, a giant in the field of computer architecture, passed away on April 2, 2018. His friends and colleagues remember him both as a special intellect, whose work underlies much of the computing that we use today, and as a special person, whose warmth,...
ASPLOS 2018 Summary
Colonial Williamsburg is a “living museum.” Its pseudo-historical buildings mostly date the the 1930s, when history buffs imagined what the early settlement might have looked like and set their guesses into literal stone. The revivalists demolished hundreds of...
Cloud, Fog, Virtual Network Functions: Toward a Continuum of Computation and Communication
In this post, I argue that the traditional separation of computation and communication is not representative of the reality of current distributed systems. Instead, a more continuous perspective of computation and communication may be of value. This change requires...
Recognizing Great Work (New and Old) on Non-Volatile Memories
Earlier this month, the 9th annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop took place on the UC San Diego campus. This year, for the first time, the organizing committee created three awards to recognize some of the best work (new and old) in the field of non-volatile memory...