Utah Arch

The Meltdown and Spectre attacks were a wake-up call for processor manufacturers.  They exposed the fact that processors are typically shipped with latent vulnerabilities.  In some of the attac...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2018/05/thoughts-on-meltdown-and-spectre.html

Five years ago, our group had visited Micron for informal research discussions (documented in an earlier blog post ).  It is fair to say that we were generally discouraged from messing with memo...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2016/08/bad-advice.html

For the most part, I've been very impressed by the review process at top architecture conferences (enough to annoy some of my colleagues in other areas :-).  But we can always do better.  Her...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2015/11/random-thoughts-on-review-process.html

My family loves the new Shaun the Sheep Movie .  The characters' resemblance to our lab is uncanny. The Advisor: barges into the lab, spews incoherent instructions, is losing hair, has memor...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2015/10/lab-demographics.html

In the next 12 months, I'll be spending half my time as an HP Labs Visiting Scholar.  The plan is to contribute to the definition of memristor architectures and other system-building efforts at ...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2014/04/hp-stint.html

In a recent project, we dug into the details of the DRAM refresh process.  Unfortunately, there is no public document that explains this well.  Hopefully, the description below helps fill this ...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-dram-refresh-tutorial.html

I recently handled student travel grants for ISCA 2013.  As is customary, I asked awardees to send me a brief trip report: > "... explain what you saw at the conference that had a h...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2013/08/student-reports-for-isca-2013.html

I engaged in a "flipped classroom" experiment for my graduate computer architecture class last semester.  In an ideal flipped classroom, the lecturing happens outside class (via on-line vide...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2013/01/observations-on-flipped-classroom.html

A brief moment of humor (and pain) in the middle of deadline chaos (true story): 8am, Saturday. Productive grad student (aka Golden Boy) sends email: I am derailed because of this blinding pain...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/11/golden-boy.html

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-magical-paper-submission.html

I'll be experimenting with a "Flipped Classroom" model in my graduate computer architecture course this Fall. I'll be recording key lectures beforehand and uploading them to YouTube.  I'll ask...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/08/flipping-my-classroom.html

The MSC Workshop was last week at ISCA , featuring a strong set of presentations.  The MSC webpage has all the final results and papers.  Congrats to the winners of each track!  Thanks to Ze...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/06/memory-scheduling-championship-wrap-up.html

The Hardware Ray Tracing group has just release our architectural simulator called simtrax. The simulator, compilation tools, and a number of example codes can all be checked out from the Google ...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/06/introducing-simtrax.html

We've just released the simulation infrastructure for the Memory Scheduling Championship (MSC) , to be held at ISCA this year. The central piece in the infrastructure is USIMM, the Utah SImul...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/02/usimm.html

I was at an NSF-sponsored Workshop on Emerging Technologies for Interconnects (WETI) last week that was attempting to frame important interconnect research directions.  I encourage everyone to...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/02/trip-report-nsf-workshop-weti.html

NSF is organizing a workshop on Cross-Layer Power Optimization and Management (CPOM) next month.  The workshop will identify important future research areas to help guide funding agencies and t...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2012/01/waking-up-to-bottleneck-realities.html

I'm guessing everyone's digging themselves out after the ISCA deadline.  I had promised not to talk about energy drinks and deadlines, so let's just say that our deadline week looked a bit like...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/11/isca-deadline.html

We recently read a couple of SOSP papers in our reading group: RAMCloud and FAWN .  These are terrific papers with significant implications for architects and application developers.  Both pa...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/11/memory-has-eye-on-disks-space.html

In my view, a Ph.D. dissertation is an over-rated document.  I'll formalize my position here so I don't get dragged into endless debates during every thesis defense I attend  :-). A classic Ph...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/10/dissing-dissertation.html

Vic Gundotra, SVP of Engineering at Google shared this inspiring story on Google+: > One Sunday morning, January 6th, 2008 I was attending religious > services when my cell phone�...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/10/right-yellow-gradient.html

I know, it’s been a little over a month since this year’s edition of the conference concluded, but better late than never! It was my first ever trip to HotChips, and I thought I should share ...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/10/hotchips-2011-delayed-trip-report.html

In the review process for top conferences, conventional wisdom says that rebuttals don't usually change the mind of the reviewer... they only help the authors feel better.  The latter is certain...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/08/rebuttals-and-reviews.html

Several papers have been written recently on the topic of last level cache (LLC) management.  In a multi-core processor, the LLC can be shared by many cores or each core can maintain a private L...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/08/debate-over-shared-and-private-caches.html

I had previously posted a brief summary of our ISCA 2011 paper .  The basic idea was to design a 3D stack of memory chips and one special interface chip, connected with TSVs (through silicon vi...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/06/killer-app-for-3d-chip-stacks.html

Just spent a great Father's Day watching the US Open with my 3-year-old son and week-old daughter in my arms.  On most Father's Days, I'm fumbling around airports and hotels, missing my family a...

http://utaharch.blogspot.com/2011/06/fathers-day.html