Interesting Times at ASPLOS

This was my first experience at ASPLOS and I really enjoyed myself. I come from the programming languages community and having attended conferences like POPL, PLDI, and OOPSLA previously, it was interesting to attend a more architecture-focused event. ASPLOS does very much bill itself as an interdisciplinary conference, and it is eye-opening to see all of the different ways researchers are crossing boundaries between programming languages, operating systems, and computer architecture.

There were several interesting themes that I perceived as prevalent at this year's ASPLOS. One was neural computing, which came up in a number of presented papers, as well as notably the keynote about Qualcomm's Zeroth spiking neural network processor. We got some hints about what programming such devices might be like, and I spoke to some of my PL colleagues about interesting potential avenues for research in this area. We heard a little bit from Qualcomm about programming models, and it seems like program analysis of programs for neuromorphic systems would be an interesting challenge.

Another theme that I perceived was heterogeneous computing, which showed up in a whole host of papers on a myriad of topics, and the debate on the last day of the conference. Talks on accelerators for various purposes, like the Q100 for database processing and the DianNao machine learning accelerator, made me think about the potential role of verification in designing reliable coprocessing hardware. It would be interesting to explore the possibility of building provably correct accelerators, and also to explore augmenting such accelerators with verifiable security or privacy guarantees.

Finally, on a less serious note, I thought the conference was very well organized and enjoyed the chance to see a bit of beautiful Salt Lake City during a spot of downtime and also the planned excursion to the Utah Olympic Oval. As other posters have commented, the presence of Indian food at the banquet was an unexpected and quite welcome surprise! Thanks to the organizers and to everyone on the program committee for making this such a fulfilling conference!