Past Semesters

Title: Advanced Fabrication Techniques, an Architects Perspective

Speaker: Jeff Stuecheli

Date: Tuesday Nov 4th, 2025; 3:30pm

Location: EER 3.640/3.642 or Zoom Link

Abstract:

In the “Post Moore’s Law Era”, advancements in computer systems have been enabled by a wide range of hardware/software features. This talk will focus on ‘advanced’ packaging and Si integration features such as 3D chip stacking. Understanding these new capabilities will be pivotal towards building future systems. This talk will survey both deployed systems and publicly available technology roadmaps.

Bio:

Dr Stuecheli has been working in Austin since the late 90s after completing my undergrad at UT. He spent 25 years at IBM working on the Power line of high end servers. His initial role was DV on the Power4 product, but transitioned into performance centric architecture work for the Power6 “nest” (caches, coherence, prefetch, NoC, memory, etc). Recognizing the role of the overall system in building optimized designs, his scope gradually expanded. In his later years, IBM attempted to grow beyond proprietary design through collaboration with companies like Nvidia and Google in the Open Power project. Dr Stuecheli then joined Nvidia, Google, and Tenstorrent for realtivly short tenures. He currently works for Arm. His current focus is the development of architectural features to enable overall system optimization.
 
While at IBM he completed graduate work at UT under Dr Lizy John, and remains active through participation on the PC of various conferences (this year ISCA, MICRO, and HPCA).

Title: Rethinking the Control Plane for Chiplet-Based Heterogeneous Systems

Speaker: Matt Sinclair, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Date: Tuesday October 14th, 2025; 3:30pm

Location: EER 3.640/3.642 or Zoom Link

Abstract:

In recent years, system designers have increasingly been turning to heterogeneous systems to improve performance and energy efficiency. Specialized accelerators are frequently used to improve the efficiency of computations that run inefficiently on conventional, general-purpose processors. As a result, systems ranging from smartphones to datacenters, hyperscalers, and supercomputers are increasingly using large numbers of accelerators (including GPUs) while providing better efficiency than CPU-based solutions. In particular, GPUs are widely used in these systems due to their combination of programmability and efficiency. Traditionally, GPUs are throughput-oriented, focused on data parallelism, and assume synchronization happens at a coarse granularity. However, programmers have begun using these systems for a wider variety of applications which exhibit different characteristics, including latency-sensitivity, mixes of both task and data parallelism, and fine-grained synchronization. Thus, future heterogeneous systems must evolve and make deadline-aware scheduling, more intelligent data movement, efficient fine-grained synchronization, and effective power management first-order design constraints. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss our efforts to apply hardware-software co-design to help future heterogeneous systems overcome these challenges and improve performance, energy efficiency, and scalability. Then, in the second part I will discuss how the on-going transition to chiplet-based heterogeneous systems exacerbates these challenges and how we address these challenges in chiplet-based heterogeneous systems by rethinking the control plane.

Bio:

Matt Sinclair is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an Affiliate Faculty in the ECE Department and Teaching Academy at UW-Madison. His research primarily focuses on how to design, program, and optimize future heterogeneous systems. He also designs the tools for future heterogeneous systems, including serving on the gem5 Project Management Committee and the MLCommons Power, HPC, and Science Working Groups. He is a recipient of the DOE Early Career and NSF CAREER awards, and his work has been funded by the DOE, Google, NSF, and SRC. Matt’s research has also been recognized several times, including an ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award nomination, a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, the David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, and an ACM SIGARCH – IEEE Computer Society TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. He is also the current steward for the ISCA Hall of Fame.

Title: FEATHER: A Reconfigurable Accelerator with Data Reordering Support for Low-Cost On-Chip Dataflow Switching

Speaker: Jianming Tong, Georgia Tech

Date: Tuesday September 9th , 2025, 3:30pm

Location: EER 3.640/3.642 or Zoom Link

Abstract:

The inference efficiency of diverse ML models over spatial accelerators boils down to the execution of different dataflows (i.e. different tiling, ordering, parallelism, and shapes). Using the optimal dataflow for every layer of workload can reduce latency by up to two orders of magnitude over a suboptimal dataflow. Unfortunately, reconfiguring hardware for different dataflows involves on-chip data layout reordering and datapath reconfigurations, leading to non-trivial overhead that hinders ML accelerators from exploiting different dataflows, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose FEATHER, an innovative accelerator that leverages a novel spatial array termed NEST and a novel multi-stage reduction network called BIRRD for performing flexible data reduction with layout reordering under the hood, enabling seamless switching between optimal dataflows with negligible latency and resources overhead. For systematically evaluating the performance interaction between dataflows and layouts, we enhance Timeloop, a state-of-the-art dataflow cost modeling and search framework, with layout assessment capabilities, and term it as Layoutloop. We model FEATHER into Layoutloop and also deploy FEATHER end-to-end on the edge ZCU104 FPGA. FEATHER delivers 1.27~2.89x inference latency speedup and 1.3~6.43x energy efficiency improvement compared to various SoTAs like NVDLA, SIGMA and Eyeriss under ResNet-50 and MobiletNet-V3 in Layoutloop. On practical FPGA devices, FEATHER achieves 2.65/3.91x higher throughput than Xilinx DPU/Gemmini. Remarkably, such performance and energy efficiency enhancements come at only 6% area over a fixed-dataflow Eyeriss-like accelerator. Our code is available at https://github.com/maeri-project/FEATHER.

Bio:

Jianming Tong (https://jianmingtong.github.io/) is a 4th-year PhD candidate at Georgia Tech, a visiting researcher at MIT. He focuses on full-stack optimizations—spanning model, system, compiler, and hardware—for enhancing both efficiency and privacy of AI systems. He proposed a framework to approximate non-linear ML operators as polynomials to be compatible with Homomorphic Encryption (HE) without utility sacrifice, enabling privacy-preserving ML via HE (model, MLSys’23), and developed the CROSS compiler to convert HE workloads as AI workloads to be accelerated by existing Google TPUs, enabling immediate scalable low-cost privacy-preserving capability to existing AI stacks and designed a dataflow-layout co-switching reconfigurable accelerator for efficient inference of dynamic AI workloads (ISCA’24). These works are widely deployed in NVIDIA, Google, IBM, and recognized by Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, Machine Learning and System Rising Star, CreateX Startup Launch, and GT NEXT Award.

Title: Securing Computer Systems using AI Methods and for AI Applications

Speaker: Mulong Luo, Postdoctoral Researcher, UT ECE

Date: Tuesday January 21, 2025, 3:30pm

Location: EER 0.806/0.808 or Zoom Link

Abstract:

Securing modern computer systems against an ever-evolving threat landscape is a significant challenge that requires innovative approaches. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), such as large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved unprecedented success in everyday applications. However, AI serves as a double-edged sword for computer systems security. On one hand, the superhuman capabilities of AI enable the exploration and detection of vulnerabilities without the need for human experts. On the other hand, specialized systems required to implement new AI applications introduce novel security vulnerabilities.

In this talk, I will first present my work on applying AI methods to system security. Specifically, I leverage reinforcement learning to explore microarchitecture attacks in modern processors. Additionally, I will discuss the use of multi-agent reinforcement learning to improve the accuracy of detectors against adaptive attackers. Next, I will highlight my research on the security of AI systems, focusing on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based LLMs and autonomous vehicles. For RAG-based LLMs, my ConfusedPilot work demonstrates how an attacker can compromise confidentiality and integrity guarantees by sharing a maliciously crafted document. For autonomous vehicles, I reveal a software-based cache side-channel attack capable of leaking the physical location of a vehicle without detection. Finally, I will outline future directions for building secure systems using AI methods and ensuring the security of AI systems.

Bio:

Mulong Luo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin hosted by Mohit Tiwari. His research interests lie broadly in applying AI methods for computer architecture and system security, as well as improving the security of AI systems including LLM and autonomous vehicles. He is selected as a CPS Rising Star 2023. His paper is selected as a finalist in Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security 2022. He is also awarded the best paper award at CPS-SPC 2018. Mulong received Ph.D. at Cornell University advised by Edward Suh in 2023. He got his MS and BS from UCSD and Peking University respectively.

Speaker: Dr. Alexandros Daglis

Title: Leveraging Serial Interfaces to Scale the Memory Wall in Server Architectures

Date: November 1st, 2024 at 1:30 pm

Location: EER 0.806/0.808 or Zoom Link

Abstract:

The memory system has historically been a primary performance determinant for server-grade computers. The multi-faceted challenges it poses is commonly referred to as the “memory wall”, referring to rigid capacity, bandwidth, and cost constraints. Current technological trends motivate a memory architecture rethink by leveraging serial interfaces, opening opportunities to overcome current limitations. Specifically, these opportunities are embodied by the emerging Compute Express Link (CXL) technology, which is garnering widespread adoption in the industry. CXL is well-positioned to revolutionize the way server systems are built and deployed, as it enables new capabilities in memory system design. CXL-centric or CXL-augmented memory systems bear characteristics that cater well to the growing demands of modern workloads. This talk will focus on two new CXL-centric memory systems for server architectures. First, we will see how a CXL-only memory system can drastically benefit modern manycore CPUs handling bandwidth-intensive workloads, despite the CXL interface’s seemingly prohibitive latency premium. Second, we will study how CXL’s memory pooling capability can be leveraged to accelerate workloads with little data locality on large-scale multi-socket NUMA systems. Both architectural approaches promise performance gains of up to 3x for their respective workload domain.

Bio:

Alexandros (Alex) Daglis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Daglis’ research interests lie in computer architecture, with specific interests in datacenter architectures, network-compute co-design, and memory systems. His research has been supported by the NSF, IARPA, Speculative Technologies, Samsung, and Intel Corporation, and routinely appears at top-tier computer architecture venues such as ISCA, MICRO, ASPLOS, and HPCA. Daglis is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and a Georgia Tech Junior Faculty Teaching Award, and his PhD thesis (EPFL, 2018) was recognized with an ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Honorable Mention.