Overview

The third Young Architect Workshop (YArch ’21, pronounced “why arch”) will provide a forum for junior graduate students studying computer architecture and related fields to present early stage or on-going work and receive constructive feedback from experts in the field as well as from their peers. Students will also receive mentoring opportunities in the form of keynote talks, a panel discussion geared toward grooming young architects, and 1-on-1 meetings with established architects.

Students will receive feedback from experts both about their research topic in general and more specifically, their research directions. Students will also have an opportunity to receive valuable career advice from leaders in the field and to network with their peers and develop long-lasting, community-wide relationships.

YArch is organized in conjunction with the 26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2021).

Mechanics

The central theme of this workshop is to serve as a welcoming venue for junior graduate students and research-active undergraduate students to present their ongoing work and receive feedback from experts within the community. In addition, this workshop also aims to help early-stage graduate students in building connections both with their peers and established architects in the community. To this end, YArch will include:

– Route to Top-tier: Each submitted work will receive two or more expert reviews. The aim of these reviews will be to give early guidance on important boxes to check for the submitted work to be a future successful top tier conference paper.

– Meet an Architect: As part of the workshop, attendees will be paired with experts in their chosen research area to get feedback on their ongoing work and future research directions.

– Becoming an Architect: The workshop will include keynote talks from academic and industry leaders specifically geared towards early stage graduate students.

– Ask an Architect: The workshop will include a panel of established architects in industry and academia from whom students can seek career advice.

 Diversity

YArch strives to be an inclusive and diverse venue for Young Architects and below are some statistics to show how we performed along this dimension at YArch’20.

– Seven out of sixteen accepted student submissions were from female students.
– Of the sixteen accepted submissions, two were from Europe, three from Asia, and eleven from North America.
– One of the two keynote speakers was female.
– Of the five panelists, two were from industry and three from academia, including two female panelists.
– Of the three workshop organizers, one was from industry and two from academia, including one female organizer.
– Of the 33 PC members, ten were from industry and 23 from academia, including eight female members.

Submissions

Eligibility: Applicants must be either
(a) research-active undergraduate students aiming for graduate school, or
(b) graduate students (Ph.D or Masters) in computer architecture and related fields who have completed less than 3 years of graduate school (Masters and/or PhD) at the time of the workshop.
A note from the student’s research advisor attesting this is required as part of the submission.

Call for Submissions: Eligible students are invited to submit their early stage or on-going work to this workshop. Submitted work should not have been presented as part of a prior ACM/IEEE conference.

The workshop invites papers from all areas of computer architecture, broadly defined. Topics of interest include, but not limited to:
– Datacenter systems
– Hardware acceleration
– Memory hierarchy
– Virtualization
– Security
– Microarchitecture
– GPUs
– Parallel architectures
– Emerging technologies

Note: This workshop is not a venue for publication and there will be no formal proceedings.

Submission guidelines: The goal of this workshop is to help students think about a problem/idea in an holistic manner and communicate your ideas to the wider community, so that we can provide some valuable early-stage feedback. To this end, we encourage you to cover the following aspects in your submission:

– Scope of problem/idea: Provide clear context for and scope of the problem(s) or idea(s) you intend to work on. This will likely form the basis of the introduction/background sections of your future work(s).

– Solution: Provide an overview of the design and implementation aspects of your solution(s) to the problem(s) described above. Given this is on-going work, focus more on providing breadth than depth. For example, beside describing the design of your idea, enlist the various system aspects which your proposed solutions will affect (e.g. does your proposed solution affect coherence protocols?) and that if you plan to discuss these effects in your future submission(s).

– Evaluation methodology: Discuss the evaluation methodology you plan to adopt to test the efficacy of your ideas. For example, the workloads that you plan to use, the tools you’ll employ (e.g., architectural simulator, real world experiments, FPGA prototypes), etc.

– Related work: This can be the traditional related work section. Please specify if you plan to quantitatively compare against some prior work. 

Submission details
– Submissions must be PDF files, in 2-column, single-spaced, 10pt format.
– Submissions must be at most 2 pages long, not including references.
– Submissions are double-blind. Please do not have any author identifying information in the paper submitted.
– Please have your research advisor send the workshop organizers an email with the following subject line “<Your name> meets YArch’21 eligibility requirements” to “yarch2021@gmail.com”.
– Submission site: https://yarch2021.hotcrp.com
– Submission deadline: February 17, 2021, 11:59pm EST