Her babysitter was Mike Bloomfield!? (the astronaut)
tkhattra 8 hours ago [-]
rip. i got a chuckle out of this trivia on her old website:
> Rob Pike didn't really name my favorite editor after me.
DespairYeMighty 13 hours ago [-]
She was a CS PhD and somewhat itinerant professor with a long career who wrote a prominent CS paper about computer memory, Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious
on her obituary page, you will see a prominent "Memory Wall" link that is NOT a reference to her paper, but a place for sharing your thoughts about her life
deater 13 hours ago [-]
you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee"
I notice these things a bit more as she was my PhD thesis advisor
marricks 12 hours ago [-]
There's only two authors! That's so rude!
setgree 8 hours ago [-]
It’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)
trvz 5 hours ago [-]
No, plural can’t be deduced from how it is written.
bjourne 9 hours ago [-]
Why? For all the automatic academic score tracking systems it doesn't matter one bit if it is Wulf et al. or Wulf and McKee.
mattkrause 7 hours ago [-]
The automated ones don't care, but it absolutely matters for the informal credit assignment process that actually runs academia.
I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.
bjourne 5 hours ago [-]
What "informal credit assignment"? It's automated and it runs entirely on quantitative data.
remexre 12 minutes ago [-]
the one where i think of a particular piece of work, and i know who did it, then tell a student "oh, see if $author's group published anything else about this."
i'm not using software for this if this is off the top of my head, and it's the sort of thing that, at scale, hurts the forgotten author and their students
john_strinlai 9 hours ago [-]
its about respect, not about academic score tracking systems
SecretDreams 10 hours ago [-]
et al should never be applied when only two authors!!!
fsckboy 8 hours ago [-]
...unless the second one is named Alfred and is an informal person
SecretDreams 3 hours ago [-]
Bruce et al
thaumasiotes 3 hours ago [-]
> you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee"
Wulf et al.
Wulf and McKee
35% less isn't usually described as "practically more".
It'd be interesting to see someone use the unabbreviated form; I have a hunch they wouldn't know to say "et alia".
b473a 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah tenure is nice but there's just a hint of mystery behind the title "itinerant professor." Like a wizard that just pops up in places to work computer science magic.
seanmcdirmid 2 hours ago [-]
I was a phd student when sally was a professor at Utah. I get the feeling that a lot of people came together for an interesting project (systems/memory related, I can’t even remember the name ATM) and dispersed when the project was at its later stages. I think it’s common in our field for many phds to work as professors for just a few years and not commit to it as a career.
swyx 3 hours ago [-]
bit ironic i guess but unintentionally fitting
fao_ 4 hours ago [-]
Damn, three years younger than one of my parents. A real shame.
Call your loved ones :(
akkartik 13 hours ago [-]
My dissertation was on the memory wall, and I never heard of her :/ RIP
AnimalMuppet 11 hours ago [-]
Could you (or someone else in the know) give us a brief overview of the current state of the memory wall issue?
Veserv 8 hours ago [-]
High bandwidth memory (HBM) can deliver TB/s of memory bandwidth and has completely shattered the memory wall for individual cores/compute elements. The only way for compute to keep up is going wide and parallel as seen in GPUs.
Despite this, massively increased memory bandwidth does not translate to material performance improvements on non-parallel compute tasks because few tasks are actually memory bandwidth bound, instead being memory latency bound.
The best known general solutions for improving memory latency are per-compute element memory caches. Unfortunately, this increases the complexity and size of your compute elements forcing you to reduce the number of compute elements, but a large number of compute elements is the only way to saturate HBM memory bandwidth.
To keep up the best known techniques are either algorithmically batch which allows you to go wide using vector/batch instructions or you go the GPU route with memory latency-hiding parallelism.
akkartik 10 hours ago [-]
Oh my knowledge is woefully out of date. But I believe the memory wall is a fact of life for the most part. Like many others, I nibbled around the edges of the constraint at massive cost in increased complexity. Outside of very specific exceptions the cure tends to be worse than the disease.
dirtbagskier 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dyauspitr 9 hours ago [-]
I’m never heard of that term.
northes 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks for your contribution, then.
Rendered at 04:32:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> Rob Pike didn't really name my favorite editor after me.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/216585.216588
on her obituary page, you will see a prominent "Memory Wall" link that is NOT a reference to her paper, but a place for sharing your thoughts about her life
I notice these things a bit more as she was my PhD thesis advisor
I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.
i'm not using software for this if this is off the top of my head, and it's the sort of thing that, at scale, hurts the forgotten author and their students
It'd be interesting to see someone use the unabbreviated form; I have a hunch they wouldn't know to say "et alia".
Call your loved ones :(
Despite this, massively increased memory bandwidth does not translate to material performance improvements on non-parallel compute tasks because few tasks are actually memory bandwidth bound, instead being memory latency bound.
The best known general solutions for improving memory latency are per-compute element memory caches. Unfortunately, this increases the complexity and size of your compute elements forcing you to reduce the number of compute elements, but a large number of compute elements is the only way to saturate HBM memory bandwidth.
To keep up the best known techniques are either algorithmically batch which allows you to go wide using vector/batch instructions or you go the GPU route with memory latency-hiding parallelism.