Hardware and Architecture

The machinery that powers many of our interactions today — Web search, social networking, email, online video, shopping, game playing — is made of the smallest and the most massive computers. The smallest part is your smartphone, a machine that is over ten times faster than the iconic Cray-1 supercomputer. The capabilities of these remarkable mobile devices are amplified by orders of magnitude through their connection to Web services running on building-sized computing systems that we call Warehouse-scale computers (WSCs).

Google’s engineers and researchers have been pioneering both WSC and mobile hardware technology with the goal of providing Google programmers and our Cloud developers with a unique computing infrastructure in terms of scale, cost-efficiency, energy-efficiency, resiliency and speed. The tight collaboration among software, hardware, mechanical, electrical, environmental, thermal and civil engineers result in some of the most impressive and efficient computers in the world.

Recent Publications

Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks with Conditional Branch Predictor
Hosein Yavarzadeh
Archit Agarwal
Max Christman
Christina Garman
Daniel Genkin
Andrew Kwong
Deian Stefan
Mohammadkazem Taram
Dean Tullsen
International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ACM (2024)
Limoncello: Prefetchers for Scale
Carlos Villavieja
Baris Kasikci
Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, United States (2024)
ConSmax: Hardware-Friendly Alternative Softmax with Learnable Parameters
Shiwei Liu
Guanchen Tao
Yifei Zou
Derek Chow
Zichen Fan
Kauna Lei
Bangfei Pan
Dennis Sylvester
Mehdi Saligane
Arxiv (2024)
CDPU: Co-designing Compression and Decompression Processing Units for Hyperscale Systems
Ani Udipi
JunSun Choi
Joonho Whangbo
Jerry Zhao
Edwin Lim
Vrishab Madduri
Yakun Sophia Shao
Borivoje Nikolic
Krste Asanovic
Proceedings of the 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2023)
Profiling Hyperscale Big Data Processing
Aasheesh Kolli
Abraham Gonzalez
Samira Khan
Sihang Liu
Krste Asanovic
ISCA (2023)