I'm very grateful to the organizers and sponsors for the travel grant. These funds really help non-US folks like me to travel across the ocean and interact with the ASPLOS community, thus opening the door to new collaborations and great projects.
The most striking thing about ASPLOS is how multidisciplinary it is. Being exposed to many novel ideas covering multiple areas was a powerful experience that stimulated many new ideas (some of which I might even pursue). Discussing the technical issues with attendees---presenters, students and senior people---was very interesting and exposed a lot of interesting perspectives on many topics. In short, ASPLOS'14 was everything a good conference should be.
The keynotes and WACI session were excellent, but I especially enjoyed the debate. Both sides made some thought provoking arguments, and did it in a funny and entertaining way. What's not to like? Personally, the points that most resonated with me were (1) that scale requires specialization, and cloud computing is shifting computation onto a few very-high-scale systems, (2) that general purpose systems absorb the best specialized techniques, and (3) that innovation historically comes from "abusing" general purpose machines in unexpected ways. I wonder if we can we have a system that provides a general purpose interface which efficiently uses a specialized implementation...
Organizationally, the conference was very well executed. Kudos and many thanks to the organizers! Making everything run so smoothly surely required a lot of hard work and dedication.
In the end, I was left with a taste for more, and looking forward to my next ASPLOS.
