CACM – Observations from Uppsala

CACM on DSAs

The July 2020 edition of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) had a front-page theme of “Domains-Specific Hardware Accelerators”, or DSAs. It contained two articles about the subject, one about an academic genomics accelerator, and one about the Google TPU. Hardware accelerators dedicated to particular types of computation are basically everywhere today, and an accepted part of the evolution of computers. The CACM articles have some good tidbits and points about how accelerators are designed and used today. At the same time, I also found a youtube talk about the first hardware accelerator, the IBM Stretch HARVEST, showing both contrasts with today as well as a remarkable continuity in concept.

“Always Measure one Level Deeper” – Advice on Performance Measurements

Recently I stumbled on a nice piece called “Always Measure One Level Deeper” by John Ousterhout, from Communications of the ACM, July 2018. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/7/229031-always-measure-one-level-deeper/fulltext. The article is about performance analysis, and how important it is to not just look at the top-level numbers and easy-to-see aspects of a system, but to also go (at least) one level deeper to measure the components and subsystems that affect the overall system performance.

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Intel Blog Post: Getting to Small Batches in System Development using Simulation

I have posted a two-part blog post to the public Intel Developer Zone blog, about the “Small Batches Principle” and how simulation helps us achieve it for complicated hardware-software systems. I found the idea of the “small batch” a very good way to frame my thinking about what it is that simulation really brings to system development. The key idea I want to get at is this:

[…] the small batches principle: it is better to do work in small batches than big leaps. Small batches permit us to deliver results faster, with higher quality and less stress.

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