Planned Segment

Datacenter Architecture: Building Warehouse-Scale Computers

Guest: Dr. Luiz André Barroso

Modern datacenters are single computers with millions of components. How do we design for failure, manage power at scale, and optimize for total cost of ownership?

Planned Segment

Analog Computing: Exploiting Physics for Computation

Guest: Dr. Yannis Tsividis

Digital abstraction dominates computing, but analog circuits can solve certain problems with far less energy. What's the role of analog computing in modern systems?

Planned Segment

Software-Defined Networking: Separating Control and Data Planes

Guest: Dr. Nick McKeown

Traditional networks tightly couple routing decisions with packet forwarding. SDN decouples these, enabling programmable networks. What are the architectural implications and practical challenges?

Planned Segment

Transactional Memory: Hardware Support for Concurrent Programming

Guest: Dr. Maurice Herlihy

Locks are the dominant concurrency primitive, but they're error-prone and don't compose. Transactional memory promises lock-free programming with atomicity guarantees. Why hasn't it displaced locks in practice?

Planned Segment

Compiler Intermediate Representations: Bridging Languages and Machines

Guest: Dr. Vikram Adve

IRs like LLVM enable language-agnostic optimization and retargeting across architectures. What design choices make IRs effective for diverse source languages and target machines?

Planned Segment

Energy-Proportional Computing: Matching Power to Workload

Guest: Dr. Christos Kozyrakis

Servers consume significant power even when idle. Energy-proportional systems scale power consumption linearly with utilization. What architectural techniques enable this, and what are the practical barriers?