Systems
91 posts in category “Systems”.
Quantum Computing Architectures: Superconducting Qubits, Trapped Ions, and the NISQ Era
2025-04-17From 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
2025-03-11How 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
2025-02-20A 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
2025-02-11How 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
2025-02-10Dive 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
2025-02-10How 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
2025-01-05A 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
2024-12-27A 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
2024-09-10Dive 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
2024-08-31A 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
2024-08-22Explore 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
2024-07-18Explore 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
2024-03-15A 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
2024-03-15A 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
2024-03-08A 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
2024-02-25A 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
2024-02-01A 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
2024-01-14A 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
2023-09-28A 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
2023-09-25A 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
2023-09-22A 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
2023-09-15A 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
2023-09-14A 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
2023-07-02A 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.