Two ICSA papers receive awards at ASPLOS 2021
April 12-23, 2021
Congratulations go to Mike O'Boyle, Boris Grot and thier respective teams on receiving awards for two papers presented at ASPLOS 2021.
ASPLOS is a top forum for interdisciplinary systems research, intersecting computer architecture, hardware and emerging technologies, programming languages and compilers, operating systems, and networking. Despite the conference being held virtually this year, this continues to be an amazing opportunity to connect with an innovative and engaged research community.
Distinguished Paper Award
“Neural Architecture Search as Program Transformation Exploration” by Jack Turner, Elliot Crowley and Mike O’Boyle
Abstract: Improving the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) is important to both the compiler and neural architecture search (NAS) communities. Compilers apply program transformations in order to exploit hardware parallelism and memory hierarchy. However, legality concerns mean they fail to exploit the natural robustness of neural networks. In contrast, NAS techniques mutate networks by operations such as the grouping or bottlenecking of convolutions, exploiting the resilience of DNNs. In this work, we express such neural architecture operations as program transformations whose legality depends on a notion of representational capacity. This allows them to be combined with existing transformations into a unified optimization framework. This unification allows us to express existing NAS operations as combinations of simpler transformations. Crucially, it allows us to generate and explore new tensor convolutions. We prototyped the combined framework in TVM and were able to find optimizations across different DNNs, that significantly reduce inference time - over 3× in the majority of cases. Furthermore, our scheme dramatically reduces NAS search time.
Distinguished Artifact Award
“Benchmarking, Analysis, and Optimization of Serverless Function Snapshots” by Dmitri Ustiugov, Plamen Petrov, Boris Grot and external collaborators
Abstract: Serverless computing has seen rapid adoption due to its high scalability and flexible, pay-as-you-go billing model. In serverless, developers structure their services as a collection of functions, sporadically invoked by various events like clicks. High inter-arrival time variability of function invocations motivates the providers to start new function instances upon each invocation, leading to significant cold-start delays that degrade user experience. To reduce cold-start latency, the industry has turned to snapshotting, whereby an image of a fully-booted function is stored on disk, enabling a faster invocation compared to booting a function from scratch.
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