A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas (CCC Senior Program Associate) interviews Dr. Mark D. Hill, the Gene M. Amdahl and John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chair Emeritus of the CCC Council. This episode was recorded prior to Dr. Hill joining Microsoft as a Partner Hardware Architect with Azure. His research interests include parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, deterministic replay and transactional memory. In this episode, Hill discusses the importance of computer architecture, the 3C model of cache behavior, and overcoming the […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas (CCC Senior Program Associate) interviews Dr. Mark D. Hill, the Gene M. Amdahl and John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chair Emeritus of the CCC Council. This episode was recorded prior to Dr. Hill joining Microsoft as a Partner Hardware Architect with Azure. His research interests include parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, deterministic replay and transactional memory. In this episode Hill discusses the importance of computer architecture, the 3C model of cache behavior, and overcoming the […]

Computing technologies have revolutionized the world, from how we grow food to our social interactions. At the core of this revolution is computing hardware, the shrinking of which has allowed for powerful computation in the palm of your hand. Unfortunately, Moore’s law is coming to an end and we will no longer be able to build more powerful computers using traditional CMOS-based hardware. What other bases for computing hardware are out there? The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized the Next Generation Computer Hardware scientific session at the 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual meeting in February to discuss this topic and share some potential avenues for future research. […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently hosted a visioning workshop on Thermodynamic Computing in Honolulu, Hawaii in order to establish a community of like-minded visionaries; craft a statement of research needs; and summarize the current state of understanding within this new area of computing. The premise behind thermodynamic computing is that striving for thermodynamic efficiency is not only highly desirable in hardware components, but may also be used as an embedded capability in the creation of algorithms. Can dissipated heat be used to trigger adaptation/restructuring of (parts of) the functioning hardware, thus allowing hardware to evolve increasingly efficient computing strategies? Recent theoretical developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics suggest that it drives […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released a call for white papers to find prospective attendees to join the upcoming Thermodynamic Computing workshop in Honolulu, Hawaii. The CCC has extended the submission deadline to October 5th. Authors of informative and well-crafted white papers may be invited to the workshop. The full call with the application instructions can be found below.  Thermodynamic Computing Workshop, Call for White Papers The CCC will hold a workshop from January 3rd to 5th, 2019 in Hawaii to create a vision for thermodynamic computing, a statement of research needs, and a summary of the current state of understanding of this new area. Workshop attendance will be by […]

The following is a blog post from ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today that considers some potential flaws in emerging software mitigations of Spectre-V1 attacks. Earlier this year, Mark Hill, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) wrote a CCC blog post on the effects of Meltdown/Spectre, which is referenced in this piece. Mark will also be part of a joint keynote at Hot Chips titled, “ Spectre/Meltdown and What It Means for Future Chip Design.”  Speculating about speculation: on the (lack of) security guarantees of Spectre-V1 mitigations   By Mark Silberstein, Oleksii Oleksenko, Christof Fetzer on Jul 2, 2018   Spectre and Meltdown opened the Pandora box of a new class of speculative execution attacks that defeat standard memory protection mechanisms. These attacks […]