ASPIRE is a proud sponsor of the the Rising Stars in EECS Workshop!
This workshop brings together women who are interested in careers in academia, for two days of scientific interactions and career-oriented discussions. It will include research talks/posters as well as presentations on aspects of life in academia – from finding a faculty position to parameters of success as a junior faculty member. Participants will have the opportunity to present their ongoing research, to interact informally with our faculty members at UC Berkeley and from MIT, Stanford University, University of Washington, UC San Diego and Harvey Mudd College, and to receive advice for advancing their careers.

More information:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/XRG/risingstars/

A video of a talk on “RISC-V: A Free and Open Instruction Set Architecture” by Krste Asanovic at Stanford is now available on YouTube.

Click Here to Register

RISC-V (pronounced “risk-5”) is a new instruction set architecture (ISA) that was originally designed to support computer architecture research and education, but which we now hope will become a standard open architecture for industry implementations. RISC-V was originally developed in the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, but has been made freely available open-source under the BSD license for anyone to use.

In addition, we hope you can join us at the first RISC-V workshop and bootcamp in Monterey CA, January 14-15, 2015.The goals of this workshop are to inform the community of recent activity in the various RISC-V projects underway around the globe and to build consensus on future steps in the RISC-V project, while the bootcamp provides an opportunity to learn about the existing RISC-V infrastructure from the RISC-V development team. The workshop and bootcamp will feature demos of multiple RISC-V silicon tapeouts as well as FPGA board designs and associated software tools.

Registration is FREE for sponsors and affiliates of the ASPIRE laboratory, as well as for UC Berkeley faculty, staff, students, and Non-UCB academics.
General registration is $75 (or $60 Early Bird rate) for the Workshop or the Boot Camp, or $129 (or $99 Early Bird rate) for both.

Early Bird rate expires Dec 1, 2014.

Appearing today in EE Times is a position piece written by Krste Asanovic and Dave Patterson making the case for open instruction sets, and RISC-V in particular.

An extended version of the article is available as a UC Berkeley technical report.

A paper written by ASPIRE Director Krste Asanovic while a graduate student at Berkeley working with fellow former graduate student Jeff Bilmes (now a Professor in the EE Department at University of Washington) and
former undergraduate Chee-Whye Chin (now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the National University of Singapore) under the supervision of Prof. James Demmel has been selected for
inclusion in the “25 Years of International Conference on Supercomputing” volume. The selection committee considered 100 most cited papers out of approximately 1800 papers published in the ICS proceedings between 1987 and 2011, and the Berkeley paper entitled “Optimizing matrix multiply using PHiPAC: a portable, high-performance, ANSI C coding methodology” was one of 35 selected for inclusion in the volume.

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) developed at Berkeley in the ParLab and ASPIRE projects.  RISC-V was originally designed to support computer architecture research and education, but  we now hope RISC-V will also become a standard open architecture for industry implementations. The base user-level ISA has now been frozen and a complete specification is available from the official RISC-V website at http:www.riscv.org, along with a comprehensive collection of tools.

Grey won for his thesis “Avoiding Communication in Dense Linear Algebra”
(Tech Report UCB/EECS-2013-151). Congratulations on the
next award in a growing list! For more information, see
http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/ballard_9742447.cfm

Congratulations to Edgar for winning the David Sakrison Memorial Prize!

More information about these awards is available online at: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Students/Awards/

The paper “Communication Costs of Strassen’s Matrix Multiplication”
by ASPIRE-affiliated Researchers Grey Ballard, James Demmel, Olga Holtz and Oded Schwartz
appeared as an invited “Research Highlight” in the latest Communications of the ACM, Feb 2014.

ASPIRE director Krste Asanovic gave the keynote presentation at the Usenix FAST 2014 conference.  The topic was the future of Warehouse-Scale Computing and the talk gave the first public presentation of the FireBox WSC  project from the ASPIRE lab. Slides and video are available from the FAST website: “FireBox: A Hardware Building Block for 2020 Warehouse-Scale Computers“.