ASPLOS experience

I am very thankful to the ASPLOS organizers for providing us with the student grants. I think it’s a generous grant and it definitely helps many students to attend the conference.

I was one of the submissions chairs for the conference. It is really satisfying to see something that you were part of the making actually happen. Most of my work was in the background - setup the submissions website, make sure everything is online all the time, the site is backed up frequently, the submission forms and the review software tweaked as desired, and so on. It was a very interesting experience for me. But the organization of the conference itself is a totally different aspect. I think it was really well done. I agree with the other posts in this regard. The location of the conference was also perfect. Salt Lake is a beautiful city and this being my first visit to Utah, made it a very memorable experience. I very much enjoyed my stay there.

The Keynote talks were really impressive, especially, the one on Neuromorphic Processing by Jeff Gehlhaar. It was interesting to see how Qualcomm is investing in “brain like” computing and I thoroughly enjoyed the talk. This is my second visit to ASPLOS and it always inspires me to meet and talk to so many people from different but related fields. My primary field is computer architecture and I don’t get a similar exposure when attending pure architecture conferences. At least for me, ASPLOS inspires me to think cross-discipline research.

Not sure if David Wood would be reading this. But here’s my alternative to the idea of combining ASPLOS and HPCA. If the community thinks that it is hard to go to HPCA and ASPLOS because they are so close to each other, may be we should think about moving the times of these conferences around a little? In Fall, we have only one deadline (talking from the perspective of an architecture student) - ISCA. Whereas, between May and August, we have three deadlines - Micro, ASPLOS, and HPCA. May be if we space things out a little, we won’t have the problem of combining the two conferences to begin with? There was some discussion at last year’s Micro about the same. Just a thought to ponder.