The Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) at Cornell University is a group of a dozen faculty and 60+ PhD students that are all working on hardware and software techniques for improving the cost, performance, programmability, reliability, and energy efficiency of future computer and robotic systems. CSL research spans much of the computer systems stack including digital VLSI, RTL, microarchitecture, architecture, compilers, and programming languages. The goal of the CSL retreat is to bring together the CSL community to share recent research results, learn about the state-of-the-art in computer and robotic systems, and explore new research collaborations.

Over 60 researchers participated in the retreat held at the Moakley House in Ithaca, NY on Friday, May 12, 2023. The keynote speakers included Prof. Britney Schmit from the Astronomy and Earth & Atmospheric Science Departments who spoke about her work on robotic exploration of ice shelves in Antarctica and Prof. Nate Foster from the Computer Science Department who spoke about his work on hardware and software abstractions for programmable data-center networks. Six student presentations and nine student posters covered diverse topics ranging from hardware security, to hardware acceleration in the cloud, to robotic design automation, to machine learning. A highlight of the retreat was the panel of four CSL alumni which made the trip back to Ithaca to share memories from their time in CSL, insights on their post-CSL career paths, and perspectives on the future of computer systems.

Retreat Agenda

8:30–9:30am Breakfast
9:30–9:40am Welcoming Remarks: Christopher Batten
9:40–10:40am Keynote: Robots Under the Ice, and One Day, in Space? (abstract)
Prof. Britney Schmit, Astronomy & EAS
10:40–11:00am Morning Break
11:00–12:20am Information Flow Control for Secure Machine Learning (abstract)
Trishita Tiwari (advisor: Ed Suh)
11:20–11:40am Enabling CPU-free Data Movement in the Cloud (abstract)
Nikita Lazarev (co-advisors: Christina Delimitrou, Zhiru Zhang)
11:40–12:00am Component-Level Robot Design Automation (abstract)
Andrew Wilhem (advisor: Nils Napp)
12:00–1:00pm Lunch
1:00–2:00pm CSL Alumni Panel
  • Ray Huang, Partner Architect @ Microsoft (bio)
  • Cunxi Yu, Assistant Professor @ University of Utah (bio)
  • Haron Abdel-Raziq, Data Scientist @ Shell (bio)
  • Ji Kim, Senior Software Engineer @ Google (bio)
2:00–2:20pm Co-Design of Binarized Deep Learning (abstract)
Yichi Zhang (advisor: Zhiru Zhang)
2:20–2:40pm Exploiting Sparsity for Efficient Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (abstract)
Jian Meng (advisor: Jae-sun Seo)
2:40–3:00pm Zero-Cost Proxies: An Efficient Approach to Neural Architecture Search (abstract)
Yash Akhauri (advisor: Mohamed Abdelfattah)
3:00–3:20pm Afternoon Break
3:20–4:20pm Keynote: Hardware and Software Abstractions for Programmable Networks
Prof. Nate Foster, Computer Science
4:20–4:40pm Student Poster Session Pitches
  • Software-Defined Vector Processing on Manycore Fabrics
    Philip Bedoukian (advisor: Adrian Sampson)
  • Integrated Rack-Scale Acceleration for Computational Pangenomics
    Nick Cebry (advisor: Christopher Batten)
  • Decoupled Model Schedule for Large Deep Learning Model Training
    Hongzheng Chen (advisor: Zhiru Zhang)
  • Error Correction in Collective Robotic Construction
    Jiahe Chen (advisor: Kirstin Petersen)
  • One-Shot Mixed-Precision Floating-Point and Integer Quantization Search
    Jordon Dotzel (advisor: Zhiru Zhang)
  • Reinforcement Learning for Automated Exploration of Cache-Timing Attacks
    Mulong Luo (advisor: Ed Suh)
  • Photonics In Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) Chip Tapeout
    Yanghui Ou (advisor: Christopher Batten)
  • Absolute Pose Estimation for a Millimeter-Scale Vision System
    Derin Ozturk (advisor: Farrell Helbling)
  • Multi-Robot Construction Systems in Unstructured Environments
    Vivek Thangavelu (advisor: Nils Napp)
4:40–6:00pm Wine/Cheese and Poster Session

Sponsors and Acknowledgements

Funding for the CSL retreat was partially provided by Intel Corporation. Thank you to Jessie Hilliker, Anthony Arcangeli and Marie Roller for their help in organizing the reatreat.