We often think about improving application performance by speeding up some part of the application itself. This can be done in many ways, such as optimizing the application code, using a more efficient algorithm, or even offloading parts of the application to specialized hardware. But a lot of the overheads that applications experience today are instead imposed by the underlying hardware interface. In this blog post, we will look at how the interface exposed by existing network interface cards (NICs) imposes significant overheads on modern applications and how a new NIC interface called Ensō can help eliminate these overheads.

Paper submission volumes have been increasing in recent years. Submissions to the largest ML conferences have grown 2-4x in just the last 3 years! Conferences and journals have to maintain the scale of peer review, even as it may become infeasible for program chairs and editors to assess reviewers’ expertise. Many conferences have adopted automated paper-reviewer assignment systems to cope with increasing submission volumes. In contrast, most journals continue to match papers to reviewers manually. This post is about automating journal paper-reviewer assignment.