Inclusion and Conference Governance
Inclusiveness is not limited to gender and race. The more our community can limit bias in all its aspects, the more inclusive our community will be, and the more people will want to join it and stay. All of us, our research, and society will benefit.
A Primer on the Meltdown & Spectre Hardware Security Design Flaws and their Important Implications
As previously reported in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog, two major hardware security design flaws—dubbed Meltdown and Spectre—were broadly revealed to the public in early January 2018. These flaws are described in detail by the discoverers in research...
Kalman filtering without Bayesians and Gaussians (II)
This is the second of a multi-part post that introduces Kalman filtering in an accessible way to computer systems researchers. In the previous post, we described how two noisy estimates of a scalar quantity such as temperature can be fused using the optimal linear...
MICRO Diversity Survey
As part of the MICRO-50 business meeting, there was a session devoted to discussing diversity in MICRO and more broadly computer architecture conferences. One of the decisions the SC co-chairs made (in consultation with many members of the MICRO community) was to get...
When to Prototype? When to Simulate? – Part II
The Looming Network Wall in Data-Intensive Computing
Fast, RDMA-capable networks present a “network wall” for data-intensive applications in a data center. Software developers are facing two unpalatable choices: either communicate using messages and re-implement features of TCP/IP in their application, or...
IEEE TCuARCH Candidate Statement
I am running for Chair of TCuARCH because I have been part of the microarchitecture community for 32 years, appreciate greatly all the good that TCuARCH has done during that period, but recognize there is still much work to be done, and would like to lead it. TCuARCH,...
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
The Year in Review The new year is upon us and it’s time to reflect on 2017 and to look ahead for 2018. We launched Computer Architecture Today with our first Welcome post on March 19, 2017. Since launch there have been 44 posts from 22 contributors, both our...