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
Mohammadkazem Taram
Archit Agarwal
Hosein Yavarzadeh
Andrew Kwong
Deian Stefan
Max Christman
Christina Garman
Dean Tullsen
Daniel Genkin
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
Zichen Fan
Kauna Lei
Dennis Sylvester
Yifei Zou
Guanchen Tao
Mehdi Saligane
Derek Chow
Bangfei Pan
Shiwei Liu
Arxiv (2024)
CDPU: Co-designing Compression and Decompression Processing Units for Hyperscale Systems
Borivoje Nikolic
Joonho Whangbo
Edwin Lim
Vrishab Madduri
Jerry Zhao
JunSun Choi
Krste Asanovic
Yakun Sophia Shao
Ani Udipi
Proceedings of the 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2023)
Profiling Hyperscale Big Data Processing
Krste Asanovic
Samira Khan
Aasheesh Kolli
Sihang Liu
Abraham Gonzalez
ISCA (2023)