Computer Architecture Podcast comparchpodcast

Dr. Karu Sankaralingam is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an entrepeneur, inventor, as well as a Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA.  His work has been featured in industry forums of Mentor and Synopsys, and has been covered by the New York Times, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum. He founded the hardware startup SimpleMachines in 2017 which developed chip designs applying dataflow computing to push the limits of AI generality in hardware and built the Mozart chip. In his career, he has led three chip projects: Mozart (16nm, HBM2 based design), MIAOW open source GPU on FPGA, and the TRIPS chip as a student during his PhD. In his research he has pioneered the principles of dataflow computing, focusing on the role of architecture, microarchitecture and the compiler. He has published over 100 research papers, has graduated 9 PhD students, is an inventor on 21 patents, and 9 award papers. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

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.

Dr. Vivienne Sze is an associate professor in the EECS department at MIT. Vivienne is recognized for her leading work on energy-efficient computing systems spanning a wide range of domains: from video compression, to machine learning, robotics and digital health. She received the DARPA Young Faculty Award, Edgerton Faculty Award, faculty grants from Google, Facebook and Qualcomm, and a Primetime Engineering Emmy as a member of the team that developed the High-Efficiency Video Coding standard.

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.

Jim Keller is the CTO of Tenstorrent, and a veteran computer architect. Prior to Tenstorrent, he has held roles of Senior Vice President at Intel, Vice President of Autopilot at Tesla, Vice President and Chief Architect at AMD, and at PA Semi which was acquired by Apple. Jim has led multiple successful silicon designs over the decades, from the DEC Alpha processors, to AMD K7/K8/K12, HyperTransport and the AMD Zen family, the Apple A4/A5 processors, and Telsa's self-driving car chip.

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.