Computer Architecture Podcast

Dr. Partha Ranganathan is a VP and Technical Fellow at Google, where he serves as the area technical lead for hardware and datacenters. Partha is currently driving next-generation computing systems for the AI era, tackling the challenges of building, scaling and managing warehouse-scale computers, and the bleeding edge of hardware-software codesign. He has pioneered numerous impactful innovations touching billions of users--spanning power-efficient servers, specialized accelerators, and disaggregated datacenters. A leading voice in the field, Partha has published 100+ papers, is a co-inventor on 125+ patents, and co-authored the seminal textbook, "The Datacenter as a Computer." He is an IEEE and ACM Fellow, a member of the ISCA, ASPLOS, HPCA halls of fame, a recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, MIT Tech Review's top-35 young innovators, distinguished alumni awards from Rice University and IIT Madras, and uniquely for a computer scientist, an Emmy Award.

Dr. Babak Falsafi is a Professor at EPFL, the founding president of the Swiss Data Center Efficiency Association, and the founder of EcoCloud, an academic consortium focused on sustainable IT. His contributions to computer architecture include the invention of spatial and temporal memory streaming (SMS prefetchers) found in ARM cores and laying the groundwork for fence speculation by defining memory ordering requirements in modern CPUs. He is a key figure in cloud-native server design, with his work forming the foundation for the first-generation Cavium ARM server CPUs. He is a former chair of the SIGARCH Executive Committee, a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.

Dr. Ricardo Bianchini is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Azure, where he leads the team responsible for managing Azure’s compute workload, server capacity, and datacenter infrastructure with a strong focus on efficiency and sustainability. Before joining Azure, Ricardo led the Systems Research Group and the Cloud Efficiency team at Microsoft Research (MSR). He created research projects in power efficiency and intelligent resource management that resulted in large-scale production systems across Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft, he was a Professor at Rutgers University, where he conducted research in datacenter power and energy management, cluster-based systems, and other cloud-related topics. Ricardo is a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.

Dr. Dan Sorin is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, and a co-founder of Realtime Robotics. Dan is widely known for his pioneering work in memory systems. He has co-authored the seminal Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence, which has become a foundational resource for students and researchers alike. Dan’s contributions span from developing resilient systems that tolerate hardware faults to innovations in cache coherence protocols, and has been recognized by multiple best paper awards and patents. His work at Realtime Robotics has pushed the boundaries of autonomous motion planning, enabling real-time decision-making in dynamic environments.

Dr. Carole-Jean Wu is a Director of AI Research at Meta. She is a founding member and a Vice President of MLCommons – a non-profit organization that aims to accelerate machine learning innovations for the benefits of all. Dr. Wu also serves on the MLCommons Board as a Director, chaired the MLPerf Recommendation Benchmark Advisory Board, and co-chaired for MLPerf Inference. Prior to Meta/Facebook, Dr. Wu was a professor at ASU. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University. Dr. Wu’s expertise sits at the intersection of computer architecture and machine learning. Her work spans across datacenter infrastructures and edge systems, such as developing energy- and memory-efficient systems and microarchitectures, optimizing systems for machine learning execution at-scale, and designing learning-based approaches for system design and optimization. She is passionate about pathfinding and tackling system challenges to enable efficient and responsible AI technologies.

Dr. Gabriel Loh is a Senior Fellow at AMD Research and Advanced Development. Gabe is known for his contributions to 3D die-stacked architectures, memory organization and caching techniques, and chiplet multicore architectures. His ideas have influenced multiple commercial products and industry standards. He is a recipient of ACM SIGARCH's Maurice Wilkes Award, is a Hall of Fame member for MICRO, HPCA, ISCA, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.

This is a special episode to commemorate the 50th anniversary of SIGARCH. We have three leaders from our community who have served as SIGARCH chairs -- Dr. David Patterson, Dr. Norm Jouppi and Dr. Natalie Entright-Jerger -- reflect on the evolution of the computer architecture field as well as our community over half a century, and share their perspectives on opportunities and exciting times ahead. David Patterson is a professor emeritus at ​​UC Berkeley, a distinguished engineer at Google, and recipient of the Turing Award. Norm Jouppi, a VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, where he is the chief architect for Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and a recipient of the Eckert-Mauchly award. Natalie Enright-Jerger is a professor at the University of Toronto, where she is the Canada Research Chair in Computer Architecture, and is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and distinguished member of ACM and IEEE.

Dr. Brandon Lucia is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Prof. Lucia has made significant contributions to enabling capable and reliable intermittent computing systems, developing techniques that span the hardware-software stack from novel microarchitectures, to programming models and tools. He is a recipient of the IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and several best paper awards.

Dr. Todd Austin is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research interests include robust and secure system design, hardware and software verification, and performance analysis tools and techniques. Todd has donned multiple hats, being a senior processor architect at Intel’s Microprocessor Research Labs, a professor at the University of Michigan, serving as the director of research centers like C-FAR, and more recently serving as the CEO and co-founder of the startup Agita Labs. He is also an IEEE Fellow and received the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for his work on SimpleScalar, and the DIVA and Razor architectures.

Dr. Fred Chong is the Seymour Goodman Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and the chief scientist of SuperTech, a quantum software startup. He is also Lead Principal Investigator for the EPiQC Project, an NSF Expedition in Computing. Previously, Fred received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1996 and was a faculty member at UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara. Fred has made significant contributions to architecture and system stack for quantum computing, and his other research interests include emerging technologies for computing, multicore and embedded architectures, computer security, and sustainable computing.

Dr. Mark D. Hill is a professor emeritus of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and currently a Partner Hardware Architect with Microsoft Azure. He has made numerous contributions to parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, and more. He is well known for his advice and collaborative work style, having published papers with 160 different co-authors. He talks to us about cross-layer optimizations, impactful collaborations, and visioning for computer architecture research.

Dr. Bill Dally is the Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at Nvidia, and a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Dr. Dally has had a storied career with contributions to parallel computer architectures, interconnection networks, GPUs, accelerators and more. He has a history of designing innovative and experimental computing systems such as the MARS accelerator, the MOSSIM simulation engine, the J-Machine and M-machine, to name a few. He talks to us about computing innovation in the post-Moore era, domain-specific accelerators, and technology transfer in computing.