Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium (2006-2007)

September 27, 2006 lecture by Norm Jouppi for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



The evolution of high-performance microprocessors has recently gone through a significant inflection point; such issues will be discussed, as well as the likely future of high performance microprocessors.

October 11, 2006 lecture by David E. Shaw for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



This talk describes the current state of the art in biomolecular simulation and explore the potential role of high-performance computing technologies in extending current capabilities.

October 18, 2006 lecture by Dror Baron for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



Dror Baron discusses the numerous rich insights information theory has to offer Compressed Sensing (CS), an emerging field based on the revelation that optimization routines can reconstruct a sparse signal from a small number of linear projects of the signal.

October 26, 2006 lecture by Jayadev "Jay" Misra for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



A programming language called Orc (for orchestration) that supports a structured way of orchestrating distributed services is proposed.

November 1, 2006 lecture by William Dally for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



A discussion about the exploration of parallelism and locality with examples drawn from the Imagine and Merrimac projects and from three generations of stream programming systems.

November 8, 2006 lecture by Kevin Hayes for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



From dial-up and PPP to 802.11 and WPA, the presentation traces how the changing connectivity landscape drove the development of new security protocols, especially in the case of wireless networks.

November 15, 2006 lecture by Richard Chuang for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



Take a personal journey through a quarter century of changes in the computer animation industry with the co-founder of PDI.

November 29, 2006 lecture by Ian Buck for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



A brief history of computing with GPUs (programmable graphics hardware), how CUDA (a new approach to computing) can solve compute intensive problems, and where GPU computing will be going in the future is discussed.

December 6, 2006 lecture by Rick Reitmaier for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380).



ActionScript, the scripting language for the Adobe Flash Player, is executed by a virtual machine (VM), the internals of which are the focus of this talk in addition to a discussion addressing Adobe's recent release of the source code of this VM to the open source community.

January 10, 2007 lecture by Anoop Gupta for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Microsoft's vision for United Communications is to break down the silos of communication modalities, allowing people, teams and organizations to communicate simply and effectively while integrating communications with their business applications and processes; the discussion concerns this vision, as well as what solutions are available and the research challenges that will be addressed to deliver this vision.

January 17, 2007 lecture by Philip Levis for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). In this tutorial, the TinyOS is detailed, including how the novel constraints of sensor networks led to its design; also covered: the role TinyOS plays in the current deployed sensor networks, the emerging network architecture within the TinyOS clouds, and what implications these clouds have on current and future Internet systems.

January 24, 2007 lecture by Kristin McDonnell for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). This talk focuses on the opportunities for growth in the mobile consumer market - casual games and the female market are forecasted to be two of the industry's primary growth drivers- and provides an overview of the industry's value chain.

January 31, 2007 lecture by Dave Patterson for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). A diverse group of UC Berkeley researchers from many backgrounds - circuit design, computer architecture, massively parallel computing, computer-aided design, embedded hardware and software, programming languages, compilers, scientific programming, and numerical analysis - met for nearly two years to discuss parallelism from these many angles.

February 7, 2007 lecture by Fabian Klass for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). The focus of this talk is on IC manufacturing process variability, i.e., how to design circuits for yield in the presence of manufacturing variations; also, the use of statistical methods in circuit design is presented.

February 14, 2007 lecture by Ian Piumarta for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Ian describes several significant aspects of the design and implementation of a programming environment that, along with a programming language, exhibits the properties desired of the system at large; he finishes by describing the remaining components of the programming system (from parsing to code generation) developed by Viewpoints Research Institute.

February 21, 2007 lecture by Cliff Click for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Cliff presents a wait-free (lock-free) concurrent Hash Table implementation with better single-thread performance than most Hash Tables, and better multi-thread performance than all other implementations he's tried; and, time permitting, he provides a short case study of a java application doing device drier model checking.

February 28, 2007 lecture by Alan Huang for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Discussion topics include optical isolators, Sagnac interferometric switches, optical slate machines and clock rate.

March 7, 2007 lecture by Phillip Zimmermann for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Phil talks about how the debate on the use of crypto has shifted since the 1990s, when it was a clash between civil liberties and law enforcement - in the 1990s, the crypto debate was about averting omniscience in governments, but today the encrypted VoIP debate may be about averting omniscience in criminals.

March 14, 2007 lecture by Bin Zhang for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). A new, simple and fast algorithm finds a sequence of nested minimum cuts of a bipartite parametric flow network. Instead of working with the original parametric flow-network, the new method works with a derived non-parametric flow network and finds a particular state of the flows in the derived network.

April 4, 2007 lecture by Mark Pinto for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). This presentation explores technology challenges in IC nanomanufacturing and reviews the most likely directions needed to sustain the pervasive growth of semiconductor content. Other applications of related nanomanufacturing technologies are also examined.

April 18, 2007 lecture by Jerry Feldman for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Jerry discusses experiences, challenges, and trends in community and democracy supporting software; the state of such efforts and some unanticipated difficulties will also be examined.

May 2, 2007 lecture by Maurice Herlihy for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Maurice talks about transactional memory, a computational model in which threads synchronize by optimistic, lock-free transactions -- this synchronization model promises to alleviate many of the problems associated with locking; the talk surveys the area, with a focus on open research problems.

May 9, 2007 lecture by Catherine Crawford for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Catherine reviews a history of programming paradigms and models, as well as workloads and subsequent programming issues from current market growth segments; she combines this review with a software view of technology and system advances to develop a sense of "what's missing" in current art for developers to engage in pragmatic parallelism in application development.

May 16, 2007 lecture by Peter Mattson for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Peter discusses how executing an application on a multicore processor can improve performance by an order of magnitude or more but poses daunting programming obstacles and how stream programming is a practical approach to overcoming these challenges.

May 23, 2007 lecture by Ian Goldberg for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). In this talk, Ian discusses "Off-the-Record Messaging" (OTR), a widely used software tool for secure and private instant messaging; he outlines the properties of Useful Security and Privacy Technologies that motivated OTR's design, compares it to other IM security mechanisms, and talks about its ongoing development directions.

May 30, 2007 lecture by Raj Amirtharajah for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). In this talk, Raj gives an overview of energy harvesting mechanisms, describes circuit and system microarchitecture techniques for energy harvesting wireless sensors, and gives specific examples of designing for energy harvesting applications; lastly, he discusses future prospects for energy harvesting technology.

June 6, 2007 lecture by Rick Wesson for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE 380). Rick talks about how to use tools to understand how one's network is abusing other networks and shows graphs and stats of trends globally and within the United States.