Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Research Competitions

Almost every year, The Journal of ILP has conducted a research competition at one of our top conferences.  For example, researchers are asked to develop a branch predictor that yields the highest prediction accuracy on a secret input data set.  I think such competitions are a great idea.  If you teach an advanced architecture class, you might want to consider tailoring your class projects in that direction.  An international competition could be a strong motivating factor for some students.  Besides, the competition organizers usually release a piece of simulation infrastructure that makes it easy for students to write and test their modules.  Recent competitions have been on cache replacement, data prefetching, and branch prediction.  The 3rd branch prediction championship will be held with ISCA this year.  I am slated to organize a memory scheduling championship with ISCA next year (2012).  The evaluation metric could be row buffer hit rates, overall throughput, energy, fairness, or combinations of these.  I have a grand 12 months to plan this out, so please feel free to send in suggestions regarding metrics, simulators, and workloads that you think would work well. 

5 comments:

  1. Do we have any news on this front? I know CPOM workshop is keeping you busy. :)

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  2. Stay tuned. I think we're a week away from releasing code.

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  3. Thanks. I saw ISCA workshop list, and JWAC is listed there. So it is just the matter of time when we get the code. Thanks for organizing it.

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  4. is there any competition related to branch prediction,
    can you please let us know

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  5. Not this year, as far as I know. There is typically a competition each year at ISCA, so keep an eye out for next year.

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