Honourable mention for ProtoGen

ProtoGen, work lead by ICSA researchers, has been designated as an honourable mention by the computer architecture community.

Every year the computer architecture community selects a set of papers published that year in the top computer architecture conferences that year. These are "significant and insightful papers that have the potential to influence the work of computer architects for years to come." This year there were 123 submissions, the committee selected 12 Top Picks and 11 Honourable Mentions. 

ProtoGen helps automate the design of cache coherence protocols which are hardware communication protocols that keep the caches of multicore processors consistent. These are notoriously hard to design and verify, yet subtle bugs can seriously affect end users; for example, a cache coherence caused the Samsung Galaxy S4 to ship with coherence disabled, with serious performance/power implications. 

This is the joint work of ICSA researchers: Nicolai Oswald and Vijay Nagarajan; and Daniel Sorin (who was on a sabbatical at Edinburgh in 2017-18). 

Related links:

Paper on ProtoGen