Thursday, March 13, 2014

Great ASPLOS experience

This ASPLOS has been well organized. I really like the lightning talks, the debate session and the excursion to curling in the Olympic oval of course. The lightning talks gave me a high-level idea on which talks I want to go. This is very helpful when there are parallel sessions. I would like to see lightning talks in all future ASPLOS.

The debate session is very interesting. It is really fun and inspiring to hear faculty members to debate on interesting research topics. The debate is about the argument: “Specialized architectures, languages, and system software should largely supplant general-purpose alternatives within the next decade”. Before the debate, 47% audience agree and 43% disagree. After the debate, only 35% agree while 50+% disagree. So I guess the reverse side successfully convince people to believe general-purpose hardware will not be supplanted. I actually voted the other way. I voted “disagree” before the debate and “agree” after the debate. I believe specialized architecture will be very useful, but it will not supplant the general-purpose alternatives. But I want to support the specialized architecture and make it pervasive if it is ever possible.

The papers and talks are amazing. I mainly work on the system side. Still, I can find several programming language and architecture works that interest me. And discussing with the authors and people is also a great way to learn their work and how they think.

There is some discussion on whether or not merging ASPLOS with other similar conferences. I disagree with the merge because the merged conference will be too big. It will be harder for us to find and talk to other people. Besides, such merge may harm the system part. I would like to see more system work in ASPLOS and hope ASPLOS keeps its own identity.

Overall, I have had a really good time at ASPLOS. Thanks a lot for such great organization!

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