Traveling

I've been fairly remiss in keeping up this blog and in keeping up appearances in real life. I'll try to at least provide an overview in this post.

I'm typing this from a hotel room in Raleigh, NC. I'm attending High-Performance Computer Architecture conference going on until Wednesday. Three other gentleman of acclaim from my lab are here, though none of us are presenting here. We're here to attend talks, ask questions, converse with presenters in the hallways, and cash in our liquor vouchers at the appropriate times.

Today's keynote was delivered by a fellow at HP and summarized the elements of HP Labs's research thrusts: intelligent infrastructure, content transformations, information management, analytics, cloud computing, and sustainability.

The first three "award" paper presentations covered (1) prefetching for linked data structures, (2) recovery and prediction from voltage emergencies, and (3) long-wire topologies for low-latency 3D networks on chip.

This afternoon, I attended several papers on multicore caching, coherence protocols, a software-managed cache implementation for IBM Cell [looking shockingly similar and not materially superior to either a software-managed cache I implemented for our PTX->Cell runtime or the SMC that ships with IBM's SDK; I didn't pipe up and notify him about this, as I don't think anyone expected it to be].

Georgia Tech is well represented here, with several full profs in attendance [not mine] and a number of students. The panel session today featured the legendary William "Bill" Dally, now of NVIDIA. As Mark Richards described, he is a brilliant and charismatic engineer who portrayed GPUs in very positive light, having lead a number of streaming architecture projects at Stanford in the past. They all agreed that multicore is important, computer architecture needs to inform computer science systems projects at various levels of abstraction [i.e. compiler writers, OS designers, and CPU architects need to have lunch at the same table every day], research projects need to be more aggressive and less product-like [i.e. make crazy and wild assumptions about the future target platforms and build from that; if your results show significant gains even though you couldn't actually build it today, maybe that's how future systems will actually be developed]. And apparently the difference between parallel computing and distributed computing is in distributed computing, you don't assume all machines are working.

Overall, this conference is far more academic than HPEC, which is very much targeted for DoD types. HPCA is very much on the academic side with some very deep and nuanced computer architecture topics occupying many of the papers. The award paper covering prefetching for linked data structures, for instance, discusses a method by which pointers may be identified on cache misses and automatically prefetched with the assumption that they point to nodes in a data structure likely to be fetched shortly anyway. The complete proceedings are presented to attendees in both print form and cleverly stored on a complimentary 1 GB USB drive / laser pointer / ballpoint pen.

That's all for now. I'll be back at some point before Thursday at 10am. I've just submitted a revised edition of my paper to GPGPU 2009. I'll fly to DC on March 7 and come back Mar 12. For future reference, make sure your ACM submission has the copyright notice on the first page; they get mad if you don't.

See you soon, dear reader(s).