Computer Architecture Podcast

Ep 11: Future of AI Computing and How to Build & Nurture Hardware Teams with Jim Keller, Tenstorrent

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.

Ep 10: Physically-constrained Computing Systems with Dr. Brandon Lucia, Carnegie Mellon University

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.

Ep 9: Hyperscale Cloud and Agile Hardware Design in China with Dr. Yungang Bao, Institute of Computing Technology

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.

Ep 8: Durable Security and Privacy-enhanced Computing with Dr. Todd Austin, University of Michigan

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.

Ep 7: Domain-specific Systems for AR/VR and Extended Reality with Dr. Sarita Adve, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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.

Ep 6: Quantum Computing Architectures with Dr. Fred Chong, University of Chicago

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.

Ep 5: Datacenter Architectures and Cloud Microservices with Dr. Christina Delimitrou, Cornell University

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.

Ep 4: Cross-layer Optimizations and Impactful Collaborations with Dr. Mark D. Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison / Microsoft

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. 

Ep 3: Privacy-preserving Covid Tracing and the Hardware-Software Stack with Dr. James Larus, EPFL

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.

Ep 2: Domain-specific Accelerators with Dr. Bill Dally, Nvidia

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.