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 […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report, the output of the CCC’s January 2019 visioning workshop of the same name. The workshop was organized by Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Erik DeBenedictis (former Sandia National Laboratories), Natesh Ganesh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Susanne Still (University of Hawaii), John Paul Strachan (Hewlett Packard Lab HPE), R. Stanley Williams (Texas A&M). It brought together physical theorists, electrical and computer engineers, electronic/ionic device researchers, and theoretical biologists to explore a novel idea: computing as an open thermodynamic system. The report begins by explaining the need for thermodynamic computers: with the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark Hill and workshop organizers Luis Ceze, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and James Larus, Full Professor and Head of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.  Luis Ceze and Jim Larus organized a DARPA ISAT workshop on Approximate Computing in February, 2014. The goal was to discuss how to obtain 10-100x performance and similar improvements in MIPS/watt out of future hardware by carefully trading off accuracy of a com putation for these other goals. The focus was not the underlying […]