If you want to get into the meat and gravy of this project, find my paper, code and video slides here under “RABT - Run-Ahead Block TAGE. Prakhar Gupta, Yuwei Sun, Rishav Sen, Reet Sinha, Swetha Karthikeyan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)”. (For the most up to date (and bug-free) code, check out my repo)

Back in November 2025, when I was done shuttling the GDS for WRAITH, I was hit with a strong wave of existentialism. “What am I going to do now?”. I had just gained back the 25+ hours/week that I had been using to crank tapeout. That very same week, I got a fortuitous email from CBP, announcing a pilot program for another championship in 2026.

Today, I watched this great talk from DevGamm Moscow in 2019. Feels extremely relevant to the current theme of AI. Thank you Jonathan Blow!

If you liked the historical discussion in the talk, do consider checking out “Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future” - Ian Morris (I haven’t read it myself but it came up in a related discussion).

Okay, so I was supposed to write this post back in December, when I finished tapeout and the shuttle had been sent to TSMC. I got busy with other stuff (read lazy) and deferred it to now - when I am on summer break.

Before I get started, huge thanks to my teammates Ingi, Pradyun, and Sam without whom this project would not have been possible.

I have been reading Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert of late. It is a great book that gets into the history of irrigation and water reclamation projects in the American west. I will reference some of the things discussed in that book here, so if you don’t want spoilers, go give it a read first. It’s full of history and economics and politics.

The Colorado river is basically just a trickle into the gulf of California now. It used to be this roaring river carrying snowmelt from the Rockies. A monstrous force of nature that carved gorges and canyons into volcanic rock that formed 11 million years ago.

The SKYLINE workshop at ISCA 2026 assembled a panel of researchers - Amir from Google DeepMind, Joseph Torellas from UIUC, Jovan Stojkovic from UT Austin and Meta, Chaojie Zhang from Microsoft Azure Research, and Benjamin C. Lee from UPenn and Google to chat about the evolving landscape of cloud-native architectures, agentic AI, and the fundamental redesign of systems from the ground up. Here is my transcript from the talk.

Amir: Self refinement is something we really need to talk about. And just to put it out there, Bayesian inference on top of LLM generated templates gives us some real added performance gains. But let me close my opening with a reflection on life, I think we sometimes forget the human side of all this technical progress.

This past semester, I took a class on parallel computer architecture, with a focus on shared memory multiprocessor systems. For the final project, my group (huge thanks to Ingi and Pradyun for carrying) and I worked on doing a characterization of Cache-Aware Scheduling on Linux.

This is the final paper we produced for the class. I converted the .tex file to a hugo compatible markdown using pandoc, followed by some tweaking to get images to render.

Hello!

I return to the blog about 2 weeks later than I should be. I will be serving my (nonexistent???) readers with some more low-vocabulary slop.

As an attempt to half-ass my new year resolution of writing a blog post every month - I will be uploading pictures from my trip to New England and NYC with some blurbs. Why? Because it is easier than writing something interesting.

Boston

One of my resolutions for this year is to write more.

So far, I have done a shitty job holding myself up to that. I have been having a hard time coming up with something to write about. Naturally, commenting on writing is much easier than writing something original. So here are my thoughts on some of the books I read in 2025.

February

Elder Race

Adrian Tchaikovsky

This was the first book (novella?) I had picked up in a while (probably 6 months). It was a great segue back into reading. The plot was easy to follow, and the characters were moderately interesting.

Intro

Last November, I got the chance to meet Daniel Genkin - at the Midwest Security Workshop. He is one of the authors/discoveres of SPECTRE and MELTDOWN , some of the most critical vulnerabilities discovered in the last decade. These were also unpatchable due to them being hardware vulnerabilities.

Bumping into Daniel was a happy coincidence for me. I was aware that MSW had a section on HW Security (which is why I went in the first place) - but I never knew that such an epic security researcher was going to be there.

This post is about 5 months late. I created the markdown file on 12/23/2025 but never got around to writing anything to it. Now, I have some time on my hands (and I feel bad about not writing as often as I had planned to) - so I figured I will give this a shot again.

Last fall, I took ECE 411 the infamous computer-architecture class at my university. This was a class I was really looking forward to. After dealing with some department advising beauracracy (and almost losing my seat in the course) I did end up taking the class - and I quite enjoyed it. The final project of the class involves designing a Out-Of-Order RISC-V CPU. This blog post is going to hopefully go over

Super Micro Open Stroage Summit 2024

https://www.thecube.net/events/supermicro/open-storage-summit-2024

I attended the last 2 events at this stummit. Here are my thoughts and notes:

The New High Performance Computing: Optimized Storage from HPC to AI

Speakers:

• Randy Kreiser Supermicro
• CJ Newburn NVIDIA
• Balaji Venkateshwaran DDN
• Bill Panos Solidigm

CJ- The moderator looks like he is being held at gunpoint.

Rate at which usage models are changing

need for new infrastructure

new models characterized by large scale and making memory accesses of fine granularity

Interactive Demo here

Features include

• Concurrency through RoundRobin Scheduler
• Interrupt Support, Keyboard IO, RTC
• Custom read-only filesystem with POXIS(-ish?) syscalls
• x86_32 Paging
• exec() and exit() functionality for certain programs

For academic integrity reasons, I cannot share the source code

This project also has mouse support, soundblasters, and real-time UART pvp TicTacToe implemented for extra credit. Not available in the online demo. This placed 3rd in the Design competition in SP24