ISCA 2021

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the world's first microprocessor and an engineering achievement that continues to evolve at a blistering pace. This technical and visionary panel offers the rare opportunity to bring together microprocessor experts who have been part of this evolution and watch them look back at 5 decades of achievement. We expect a lively discussion as the panel exchanges ideas about what the microprocessor might be in another 25 years (assuming it still exists in a recognizable form). The panelists collectively span most major microprocessor architectures and spent their careers at companies such as Acorn/Arm, Tensilica, Centaur, IBM, and Intel:

• Federico Faggin: designer of the first commercial microprocessor (Intel 4004), awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation
• John Hennessy: co-founder of MIPS Technologies, pioneer of RISC (shared Turing award), Chairman of Alphabet, 10th President of Stanford, author of popular architecture book
• David Patterson: led Berkeley RISC project (which became the basis for Sun SPARC), pioneer of RISC (shared Turing award), currently at Google, author of popular architecture book
• Glenn Henry: designed computers spanning from IBM mainframes to personal computers and custom x86 CPUs, IBM Fellow, Sr. VP Dell, Pres. Centaur Technology
• Kathy Papermaster: 26 years of experience at IBM, led multiple IBM projects, including the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor
• Lee Smith: co-founded Arm, led development of software tools at Acorn and Arm, Arm Fellow
• Shekhar Borkar: directed Intel microprocessor research for 34 years, former Intel Fellow, currently at Qualcomm
• Chris Rowen: co-founder of MIPS Technologies, Tensilica, Babblelabs, pioneer of microprocessor hardware/software co-design

The panel will be moderated by J. Scott Gardner, an independent microprocessor-technology analyst. Panel Chair: Lizy K. John.

The biological and life sciences present a wealth of sophisticated and efficient computing substrates and, as a consequence, have been the source of inspiration for next-generation computing. This panel will cover emerging opportunities for research cross-pollination between the life sciences and computing technologies. Discussions will focus on topics ranging from machine learning and neural networks, brain computer interfaces, molecular & DNA computing, to the opportunities that they present for classical computing and acceleration, as well as emerging neuromorphic and quantum computing technologies

Quantum computers promise to solve a class of commercial and scientifically important problems that are beyond the abilities of classical computers. Computing, whether it is conventional or quantum, is ultimately a series of transformations, ranging from algorithms at the top, to devices at the bottom. Over the past three decades, there has been significant progress in the field of quantum algorithms (which relies on mathematical properties of quantum states) and quantum devices (which relies on physical properties of materials), however, the role of computer systems (which transforms mathematics into physics) has only recently started to gain prominence.

This panel will discuss the role and the challenges for the architecture and compiler community in making quantum computing practical.

Panelist bios:

• Ali Javadi-Abhari is a Principal Research Staff Member at IBM. His research interests are in compiler and architecture issues in near-term quantum computing. He was the main architect of the Scaffold quantum programming language and the Qiskit quantum information science package. He leads the compilation sub-thrust of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, as part of the National Quantum Initiative. He received his PhD in computer science from Princeton in 2017.
• Caroline Collange is a research scientist at Inria Rennes in France since 2012. Her research interests include compiler optimization and microarchitecture for quantum computers and GPUs. She was previously a post-doc researcher at UFMG, Brazil and an assistant professor at ENS Lyon, France.
• Kenneth Brown is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Duke University. He is the Director of the National Science Foundation Software-Tailored Architectures for Quantum co-design (STAQ) project.
• Devesh Tiwari directs the Goodwill Computing Lab at Northeastern University (Boston campus). Before joining Northeastern, Devesh was a staff scientist at the United States Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research interests are around HPC and data center systems, and quantum computing. He is an Associate Editor for Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Transactions on Storage (ToS) and Journal of Parallel & Distributed Computing (JPDC).
• The panel will be moderated by Moinuddin Qureshi, Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech.

The new era of computer architecture heavily focuses on cross-stack system design with heterogeneous accelerators and new memory and storage systems. This change brings the opportunity and excitement of innovating new systems, but also introduces the challenge of building tools and system components necessary to evaluate radically new designs. The question we will discuss on this panel is the following: how should the architecture community propose, validate, and prototype ideas in this new era of computer architecture to maximize the impact?

The 50 years of microprocessor technologies have tremendously advanced all aspects of our lives. This panel provides us the space to examine the powerful technologies we are developing, responsibilities and societal impacts we must keep in mind when developing the technologies. This panel will discuss the societal challenges brought by digital technologies — the ever-increasing carbon emissions from computing, bias and fairness issues facing AI technologies, and the disparate social justice. What underinvested research directions should the community focus on in order to build environmentally-sustainable, socially-responsible technologies for the next decades to come?

Panelist bios:

• Srilatha (Bobbie) Manne has worked in the computer industry for over two decades in both industrial research labs and product teams at Compaq, Intel, AMD and Cavium. She is currently a Principal Hardware Engineer in the Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure group at Microsoft. Her work has focused on power and performance analysis from processor microarchitecture to data centers. Srilatha has continued to publish while in industry, and has more than 29 patents granted. She was also the recipient of the 2014 ISCA Influential Paper Award for her work on power reduction in processor design. Srilatha has been active in the academic community through service on program committees, serving as General Chair for ISCA 2019, and giving a keynote address at MICRO 2020. Her latest passion is collaborating with an interdisciplinary group of engineers and technical experts to develop a more sustainable computational ecosystem from client devices to data centers.
• Partha Ranganathan is currently a VP, technical Fellow at Google where he is the area technical lead for hardware and datacenters, designing systems at scale. Prior to this, he was a HP Fellow and Chief Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs where he led their research on systems and data centers. Partha has worked on several interdisciplinary systems projects with broad impact on both academia and industry, including widely-used innovations in energy-aware user interfaces, heterogeneous multi-cores, power-efficient and sustainable servers, domain-specific accelerators, and disaggregated and data-centric data centers. He has published extensively (including being the co-author on the popular "Datacenter as a Computer" textbook), is a co-inventor on more than 100 patents, and has been recognized with numerous awards. He has been named a top-15 enterprise technology rock star by Business Insider, one of the top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Tech Review, and is a recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, Rice University's Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni award, and the IIT Madras distinguished alumni award. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and is currently on the board of directors for OpenCompute.
• Shane Greenstein is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration and co-chair of the HBS Digital Initiative. He teaches in the Technology, Operations and Management Unit. Encompassing a wide array of questions about computing, communication, and Internet markets, Professor Greenstein's research extends from economic measurement and analysis to broader issues. His most recent book, How the Internet Became Commercial (2015, Princeton University Press), won the 2016 Schumpeter Prize for best book. He also publishes commentary on his blog, Digitopoly, and many media outlets cover his work. Professor Greenstein previously taught at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. He received his PhD from Stanford University, and his BA from University of California at Berkeley, both in economics. He continues to receive a daily education in life from his wife and children.
• Carole-Jean Wu is currently a Technical Lead at Facebook AI Research. Her research lies in the domain of computer architecture. Her work has included designing energy- and memory-efficient systems, building and optimizing systems for machine learning execution at-scale. She is passionate about tackling system challenges to enable efficient, responsible AI execution. Carole-Jean chairs the MLPerf Recommendation Benchmark Advisory Board, co-chaired MLPerf Inference, and serves on the MLCommons Board as a director. Carole-Jean is a tenured Associate Professor at ASU (on leave). She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton and B.Sc. from Cornell. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Distinction of Honorable Mention of the CRA Anita Borg Early Career Award, the IEEE Young Engineer of the Year Award, the Science Foundation Arizona Bisgrove Early Career Scholarship, and the Intel PhD Fellowship, among a number of IEEE Micro Top Picks, IEEE Best Paper awards.
• Sarah Bird leads the responsible and ethical development of the Azure AI Cognitive Services at Microsoft. As an expert in responsible AI implementation, she contributes to the development and adoption of responsible AI principles, best practices, and technologies company-wide. Sarah led the product development of responsible AI tools including Fairlearn, SmartNoise and InterpretML. She is an active member of the Microsoft AETHER committee and contributed to the creation of the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard. Sarah was one of the founding researchers in the Microsoft FATE research group. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley advised by Dave Patterson, Krste Asanovic, and Burton Smith.

In the last decade, the computer architecture research community has grown dramatically. There are now many young faculty and graduate students in many academic institutions. With the seismic changes taking place in our technical field, we have an opportunity to use these creative minds to crack some of the many computer systems architecture challenges. To do so, researchers need to be aware of the opportunities available to them. This panel will include leaders from industry and funding agencies who will help the audience reflect on the existing funding and research opportunities, priorities and future trends.