Offensive Security Research in Computer Architecture Conferences
We rarely see attack papers published in architecture conferences. What is the benefit of publishing attacks? What makes an attack paper instructive and valuable?
The Road to Success In Industry
In academia, your teachers/advisor lays out well defined goals: Get an A in the class to prove your knowledge of the material; Publish in top tier conferences or journals to prove your research capabilities. Finish all the required classes and/or publish the requisite...
Gender Diversity in Computer Architecture
Part One: We’re Just Going to Leave This Here TL;DR – In part one of our series on gender diversity within the subdiscipline of computer architecture, we present some data that provides signal on where our community stands today with respect to gender diversity....
Remembering Nathan Binkert
It is with great regret that I pass on the news that our colleague and friend Nathan Binkert is no longer with us. Nate passed away unexpectedly on September 21st after collapsing at the gym. Nate was a computer scientist of remarkable breadth, equally at home...
When to Prototype? When to Simulate?
In this blog article we touch the subject of architectural evaluation methodology. We took the effort to interview some experts and collect opinions from experts on this subject. While everyone raises unique points, there seems to be some consensus.. The picture...
SIMD Instructions Considered Harmful
In the process of writing a short introduction to RISC-V, we compared RISC-V vector code to SIMD. We were struck by the insidiousness of the SIMD instruction extensions of ARM, MIPS, and x86. We decided to share those insights in this blog, based on Chapter 8 of our...
Leave your OS at home: the rise of library operating systems
The efficiency of Operating Systems (OSes) has always been in the spotlight of systems researchers, ever since the seminal Dijkstra’s THE multiprogramming system in early 60s. But the reason for this obsession is not entirely obvious. While the OS is commonly...
Worth the Read
Increasing diversity in the broad field of computing is an ongoing challenge. Although many people are aware of the “google memo”, I don’t think many SIGARCH (and adjacent SIG) members are aware of a rebuttal by John Hennessy, Maria Klawe, and David...
Overwhelming Statistical Evidence That Our Review Process Is Broken
I have been saying that over-positive PC (OPPC) members’ high scores mess up the paper rankings, the coverage of online discussions (lower-score papers are ignored), and the discussion order at the PC meeting. Previously I had analyzed only the pre-rebuttal score distributions but not the impact on the actual outcomes. Now, I have statistical evidence of the impact.
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