Engineering machines that learn faster, compute more efficiently, operate safer, program easier, and integrate more responsibly (yes we do all that!)
A Few Recent Projects
Security from the Gates Up
Hardware vulnerabilities lurk in the wild
Security and correctness issues continue to plague our systems, but increasingly it is the hardware at fault. Given that hardware is impossible to "patch", we need to new techniques that help us get our systems right the first time. The security techniques developed at UCSB are now deployed around the world and we continue to make important new discoveries weekly.
Hardware from Python
Screenshot of PyRTL in action
Building hardware can be as fun as coding again! PyRTL provides a collection of classes for register-transfer level design, simulation, tracing, and testing suitable for teaching and research. Simplicity, usability, clarity, and extensibility rather than performance or optimization is the overarching goal. We have used to for everything from OpenTPU to Zarfcore.
Neuro-Inspired Temporal Logic
Analog Race-Logic Prototype in Dr. madhavan's hand
Brains have much to teach us about performing energy efficient computations. Our work on "race logic" has led to a class of neuro-inspired delay coded designs with orders of magnitude lower energy per computation as compared to prior approaches. There are more open questions than answers at this point but delay codes seem to unlock efficiency in exciting new ways.
A Couple of Recent Papers
Joseph McMahan, Michael Christensen, Kyle Dewey, Ben Hardekopf, and Timothy Sherwood. Bouncer: Static Program Analysis in Hardware Proceedings of the International Symposium of Computer Architecture. (ISCA) June 2019. Phoenix, AZ
Georgios Tzimpragos, Advait Madhavan, Dilip Vasudevan, Dmitri Strukov, and Timothy Sherwood. Boosted Race Trees for Low Energy Classification Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) (best paper award) April 2019. Providence, RI
Deeksha Dangwal, Weilong Cui, Joseph McMahan, and Timothy Sherwood. Safer Program Behavior Sharing Through Trace Wringing Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) April 2019. Providence, RI
Nestan Tsiskaridze, Lucas Bang, Joseph McMahan, Tevfik Bultan, and Timothy Sherwood. Information Leakage in Arbiter Protocols Proceedings of the International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA) October 2018. Los Angeles, CA
Weilong Cui, Yongshan Ding, Deeksha Dangwal, Adam Holmes, Joseph McMahan, Ali JavadiAbhari, Georgios Tzimpragos, Frederic T. Chong, and Timothy Sherwood. Charm: A Language for Closed-form High-level Architecture Modeling Proceedings of the International Symposium of Computer Architecture. (ISCA) June 2018. Los Angeles, CA
"Advanced computer system design is not an island, but rather it sits between algorithms, machine learning, operating systems, compilers, circuits, networks, and security; by looking at computer architecture and embedded systems through the eyes of it's application we can enact the biggest change. This is the basic philosophy of our lab!"
View from the window of the ArchLab at UC Santa Barbara
