Computer Architecture Podcast

Dr. Karu Sankaralingam is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an entrepeneur, inventor, as well as a Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA. His work has been featured in industry forums of Mentor and Synopsys, and has been covered by the New York Times, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum. He founded the hardware startup SimpleMachines in 2017 which developed chip designs applying dataflow computing to push the limits of AI generality in hardware and built the Mozart chip. In his career, he has led three chip projects: Mozart (16nm, HBM2 based design), MIAOW open source GPU on FPGA, and the TRIPS chip as a student during his PhD. In his research he has pioneered the principles of dataflow computing, focusing on the role of architecture, microarchitecture and the compiler. He has published over 100 research papers, has graduated 9 PhD students, is an inventor on 21 patents, and 9 award papers. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

Dr. Gabriel Loh is a Senior Fellow at AMD Research and Advanced Development. Gabe is known for his contributions to 3D die-stacked architectures, memory organization and caching techniques, and chiplet multicore architectures. His ideas have influenced multiple commercial products and industry standards. He is a recipient of ACM SIGARCH's Maurice Wilkes Award, is a Hall of Fame member for MICRO, HPCA, ISCA, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.

Dr. Vivienne Sze is an associate professor in the EECS department at MIT. Vivienne is recognized for her leading work on energy-efficient computing systems spanning a wide range of domains: from video compression, to machine learning, robotics and digital health. She received the DARPA Young Faculty Award, Edgerton Faculty Award, faculty grants from Google, Facebook and Qualcomm, and a Primetime Engineering Emmy as a member of the team that developed the High-Efficiency Video Coding standard.

This is a special episode to commemorate the 50th anniversary of SIGARCH. We have three leaders from our community who have served as SIGARCH chairs -- Dr. David Patterson, Dr. Norm Jouppi and Dr. Natalie Entright-Jerger -- reflect on the evolution of the computer architecture field as well as our community over half a century, and share their perspectives on opportunities and exciting times ahead. David Patterson is a professor emeritus at ​​UC Berkeley, a distinguished engineer at Google, and recipient of the Turing Award. Norm Jouppi, a VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, where he is the chief architect for Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and a recipient of the Eckert-Mauchly award. Natalie Enright-Jerger is a professor at the University of Toronto, where she is the Canada Research Chair in Computer Architecture, and is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and distinguished member of ACM and IEEE.

Jim Keller is the CTO of Tenstorrent, and a veteran computer architect. Prior to Tenstorrent, he has held roles of Senior Vice President at Intel, Vice President of Autopilot at Tesla, Vice President and Chief Architect at AMD, and at PA Semi which was acquired by Apple. Jim has led multiple successful silicon designs over the decades, from the DEC Alpha processors, to AMD K7/K8/K12, HyperTransport and the AMD Zen family, the Apple A4/A5 processors, and Telsa's self-driving car chip.

Dr. Brandon Lucia is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Prof. Lucia has made significant contributions to enabling capable and reliable intermittent computing systems, developing techniques that span the hardware-software stack from novel microarchitectures, to programming models and tools. He is a recipient of the IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and several best paper awards.

Dr. Yungang Bao is a professor at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the deputy director of ICT-CAS. Prof. Bao founded the China RISC-V Alliance (CRVA) and serves as the secretary-general of CRVA. His research interests include open-source hardware and agile chip design, datacenter architecture and memory systems. Prof. Bao’s contributions include developing the PARSEC 3.0 benchmark suite which has been adopted by leading industry players in China (like Alibaba and Huawei), the labeled von Neumann paradigm to enable a software-defined cloud, Hybrid Memory Trace Tool (HMTT), and Partition-Based DMA Cache. He was awarded the CCF-Intel Young Faculty Award, was the winner of CCF-IEEE CS Young Computer Scientist Award, and received China’s National Honor for Youth under 40.

Dr. Todd Austin is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research interests include robust and secure system design, hardware and software verification, and performance analysis tools and techniques. Todd has donned multiple hats, being a senior processor architect at Intel’s Microprocessor Research Labs, a professor at the University of Michigan, serving as the director of research centers like C-FAR, and more recently serving as the CEO and co-founder of the startup Agita Labs. He is also an IEEE Fellow and received the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for his work on SimpleScalar, and the DIVA and Razor architectures.

Dr. Sarita Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests span the system stack, including hardware, programming languages, operating systems, and applications. She co-developed the memory consistency models for the C++ and Java programming languages, based on her early work on data-race-free (DRF) models, and has made innovative contributions to heterogenous computing and software-driven approaches to resiliency. Her group recently released the Illinois Extended Reality testbed (ILLIXR), the first fully open source extended reality system to democratize XR systems research and development. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, IEEE, ACM and a recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award. As ACM SIGARCH chair, she co-founded the CARES movement, and is a winner of the CRA distinguished service award.

Dr. Fred Chong is the Seymour Goodman Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and the chief scientist of SuperTech, a quantum software startup. He is also Lead Principal Investigator for the EPiQC Project, an NSF Expedition in Computing. Previously, Fred received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1996 and was a faculty member at UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara. Fred has made significant contributions to architecture and system stack for quantum computing, and his other research interests include emerging technologies for computing, multicore and embedded architectures, computer security, and sustainable computing.

Dr. Christina Delimitrou is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Cornell University. Prof. Delimitrou has made significant contributions to improving resource efficiency of large-scale datacenters, QoS-aware scheduling and resource management techniques, performance debugging, and cloud security. She received the 2020 IEEE TCCA Young Architect Award for leading research in ML-driven management and design of cloud systems. She talks to us about datacenter architectures, cloud microservices, and applying machine learning techniques to optimizing and managing these systems.

Dr. Mark D. Hill is a professor emeritus of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and currently a Partner Hardware Architect with Microsoft Azure. He has made numerous contributions to parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, and more. He is well known for his advice and collaborative work style, having published papers with 160 different co-authors. He talks to us about cross-layer optimizations, impactful collaborations, and visioning for computer architecture research.

Dr. James Larus is Professor and Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. Prof. Larus has made contributions to several fields spanning programming languages, compilers, computer architecture, and computer systems. He co-led the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel project, started the Singularity project at Microsoft Research (MSR), created Orleans framework for cloud programming as director of the Extreme Computing Group at MSR. He talks to us about privacy-by-design, the associated challenges across the hardware-software stack, and the implications on the design of digital contact-tracing protocols (DP-3T) during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr. Bill Dally is the Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at Nvidia, and a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Dr. Dally has had a storied career with contributions to parallel computer architectures, interconnection networks, GPUs, accelerators and more. He has a history of designing innovative and experimental computing systems such as the MARS accelerator, the MOSSIM simulation engine, the J-Machine and M-machine, to name a few. He talks to us about computing innovation in the post-Moore era, domain-specific accelerators, and technology transfer in computing.

Dr. Kim Hazelwood is the west coast head of engineering at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Prior to Facebook, Kim has donned several hats from being a tenured professor at the University of Virginia, directory of systems research at Yahoo Labs, and a software engineer at Google. Today, she joins us to discuss systems for Machine Learning (ML), and share her insights on having an agile career.