Back from HiPC 2004

The last couple of weeks were extremely hectic taking care of all the arrangements to be done for HiPC 2004. This year, we had some excellent keynote talks, including:

• Arvind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Rethinking Computer Architecture Research": Arvind had some very interesting points to make about the direction of computer architecture research academia has been doing for the last couple of decades. The main point was that simple simulation results and claims for incremental increase in efficiency, power, performance, etc. are completely irrelevant as far as the industry goes. The need for a more collaborative approach to computer architecture research has never been greater, and he described some of the recent work his team has been doing in this regard at MIT (Bluespec).
• Norm Jouppi, Hewlett Packard ”The Future Evolution of High Performance Microprocessors". This talk sort of defined the next decade of the evolution of microprocessors given the trend of semiconductor technology and Moore's Law. Essentially his point was that there is no single silver bullet to avoid the Power Wall and limitations of existing Si-Ge process technology.
• Christos Papadimitriou, University of California, Berkeley on "Networks and Games". Christos is a quite an entertaining personality even in keynote talks. His talk spanned game theory concepts like Nash equilibria, cooperative & non-cooperative gaming theory, application to the Internet and networking paradigms, etc. He mentioned & acknowledged his recent collaborators that included big names like Tim Roughgarden (Stanford), Eva Tardos (Cornell), and it was pleasantly surprising to hear him mention a friend of mine Rahul Sami (used to know him at Yale, now he is a post doc at MIT).

I had to take care of some arrangements for the keynote speakers, and it was wonderful to see how nice these people are - unassuming, extremely polite & just plain nice to talk to. I could not help contrast that to the arrogant & rude people I come across who think no end of themselves, and for no reason what-so-ever.

It was nice meeting up with a whole bunch of folks - Dr. Prathima Agrawal, Dr. Vishwani Agrawal, Dr. Sartaj Sahni, and also my advisor from my Rutgers days, Dr. Manish Parashar. It was a nice experience being in the Steering Committee meetings for such conferences. HiPC 2005 is in Goa, FYI.

This time, we also had a larger participation this year, including a lot of students from Indian colleges & universities. Not to mention the great set of volunteers we had - we also managed to get a few more interested in helping out for next year! Animesh will hopefully have some pics soon online.