Systems

• Quantum Computing Architectures: Superconducting Qubits, Trapped Ions, and the NISQ Era · 2025-04-17

  From transmon Hamiltonians to Majorana zero modes — a deep architectural dive into the physical platforms competing to build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer, and why the error correction overhead dominates everything.

• CHERI and Capability Hardware: Memory Safety at the Gate Level · 2025-03-11

  How CHERI Concentrate compression, the load barrier for temporal safety, and the Arm Morello prototype are reshaping what it means to build a secure processor — and why formal verification of capability integrity is the hard part.

• Memory Allocation and Garbage Collection: How Programs Manage Memory · 2025-02-20

  A deep dive into how programming languages allocate, track, and reclaim memory. Understand malloc internals, garbage collection algorithms, and the trade-offs that shape runtime performance.

• RISC-V: The Open ISA Revolution and the Cambrian Explosion of Processor Design · 2025-02-11

  How a Berkeley research project became the Linux of instruction sets, rewiring the economics of custom silicon from embedded MCUs to vector supercomputers with the RVV extension and the CHERI security story.

• Kernel Bypass Networking: DPDK, io_uring, and the RDMA Revolution · 2025-02-10

  Dive into how modern systems escape the kernel networking stack for microsecond-scale performance: DPDK's poll-mode drivers, io_uring's submission rings, RDMA's one-sided operations, and the trade-offs each approach demands.

• Processing-in-Memory: UPMEM, Samsung HBM-PIM, and the Near-Data Computing Paradigm · 2025-02-10

  How moving compute to where the bits live rewrites the rules of memory-bound computation, from UPMEM's DRAM-scale PIM to Samsung's HBM-PIM and the programming model that still keeps us up at night.

• Neuromorphic Computing: Loihi 2, TrueNorth, Spiking Networks, and Where Neuromorphic Wins · 2025-01-05

  A deep survey of neuromorphic computing from IBM TrueNorth and Intel Loihi 2 through spiking neural networks, STDP learning, event-driven computation, and the application domains where neuromorphic excels and where it falls short.

• Optical Computing: Silicon Photonics, Optical Matrix Multiplication, and the Integration Challenges · 2024-12-27

  A deep analysis of optical computing from silicon photonic interconnects through optical matrix multiplication for AI, examining the energy-latency promise against the formidable integration challenges.

• Write-Ahead Logging: The Unsung Hero of Database Durability · 2024-09-10

  Dive deep into write-ahead logging (WAL), the technique that lets databases promise durability without sacrificing performance. Learn how WAL works, why it matters, and how modern systems push its limits.

• Network Topologies for HPC: Fat-Trees, Dragonfly, Torus, and the Cost-Diameter-Bandwidth Optimization · 2024-08-31

  A rigorous survey of HPC network topologies—fat-tree (InfiniBand), Dragonfly (Cray Cascade), torus (Blue Gene), Slim Fly—analyzing the fundamental tradeoffs in cost, diameter, bisection bandwidth, and fault tolerance.

• Bloom Filters and Probabilistic Data Structures: Trading Certainty for Speed · 2024-08-22

  Explore how Bloom filters, Count-Min sketches, and HyperLogLog sacrifice perfect accuracy for dramatic space and time savings—and learn when that trade-off makes sense.

• Lock-Free Data Structures: Concurrency Without the Wait · 2024-07-18

  Explore how lock-free algorithms achieve thread-safe data access without traditional locks. Learn the theory behind compare-and-swap, the ABA problem, memory ordering, and practical implementations that power high-performance systems.

• Concurrency Primitives and Synchronization: From Spinlocks to Lock-Free Data Structures · 2024-03-15

  A comprehensive exploration of concurrent programming fundamentals, covering mutexes, spinlocks, semaphores, condition variables, memory ordering, and lock-free programming techniques that enable safe parallel execution.

• Unicode and Character Encoding: From ASCII to UTF-8 and Beyond · 2024-03-15

  A comprehensive guide to how computers represent text. Understand the evolution from ASCII through Unicode, the mechanics of UTF-8 encoding, and how to handle text correctly in modern software.

• Interconnects: PCIe, CXL, NVLink, and the Emerging Composable-Disaggregated Architecture · 2024-03-08

  A deep technical survey of modern interconnects—PCIe generations 1-6, CXL.io/cache/memory protocols, NVLink and NVSwitch—and how they enable composable-disaggregated infrastructure.

• Transactional Memory: HTM, STM, and Why Intel TSX Kept Getting Disabled · 2024-02-25

  A deep analysis of transactional memory—hardware (Intel TSX, IBM POWER), software (STM), the transactional lock elision pattern, and the bug saga that repeatedly forced Intel to disable TSX via microcode.

• Simultaneous Multithreading: Resource Sharing, Security Implications, and the SMT Performance-Security Tradeoff · 2024-02-01

  A deep dive into SMT/Hyper-Threading: how frontend and backend resources are shared between threads, the security vulnerabilities like PortSmash and TLBleed, and the evolving performance-security tradeoff.

• VLIW and EPIC: The Multiflow Trace, Itanium, and Why Static Scheduling Lost to Out-of-Order · 2024-01-14

  A historical and technical analysis of VLIW and EPIC architectures—the Multiflow Trace, Intel Itanium—examining static scheduling, predication, rotating registers, and why out-of-order superscalar won the commercial battle.

• Superscalar Processors: Register Renaming, Reorder Buffers, and How Modern Cores Extract ILP · 2023-09-28

  A microarchitectural deep dive into superscalar execution: register renaming, the reorder buffer, reservation stations, and the issue queue, examining how Haswell, M1, and Zen4 extract instruction-level parallelism from sequential code.

• Anonymous Communication: Onion Routing, Mix Networks, DC-Nets, and the Anonymity Trilemma · 2023-09-25

  A rigorous analysis of anonymous communication systems from Tor's onion routing through mix networks like Loopix and Nym to DC-nets, exploring the anonymity trilemma and traffic analysis resistance.

• File Systems and Storage Internals: How Data Persists on Disk · 2023-09-22

  A comprehensive exploration of file system architecture, from inodes and directories to journaling and copy-on-write. Understand how operating systems organize, protect, and efficiently access persistent data.

• Smart Contract Security: Reentrancy, Front-Running, and Verification with Certora and Foundry · 2023-09-15

  A rigorous treatment of smart contract vulnerabilities—reentrancy, integer overflow, front-running/sandwich attacks—and the modern verification toolkit including the Certora Prover and Foundry fuzzing framework.

• Memory Allocators: From malloc to Modern Arena Allocators · 2023-09-14

  A deep dive into memory allocation strategies, from the classic malloc implementations to modern arena allocators, jemalloc, tcmalloc, and custom allocators that power high-performance systems.

• Blockchain Consensus: Nakamoto Consensus, Casper FFG, Tendermint BFT, and the Safety-Liveness Tradeoff · 2023-07-02

  A rigorous analysis of blockchain consensus protocols from PoW through PoS to BFT, exploring the fundamental safety-liveness tradeoff in permissionless settings and the role of finality gadgets.