Speaking Skills Talk - Hugo Sadok
July 17, 2026 3:00PM—4:00PM
Location:
8102
-
Gates and Hillman Centers
Speaker:
HUGO SADOK,
Ph.D. Student, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University
https://hsadok.com/
Peripheral devices have long relied on ad-hoc interfaces. While ad-hoc interfaces were suitable when peripheral devices were simple and communicated primarily with the CPU, the lack of a unified interface now hinders interoperability and flexibility as devices become primary compute platforms (e.g., GPUs, SmartNICs, and ML accelerators). This talk challenges the assumption that such ad-hoc interfaces are necessary for performance, arguing that a single general interface can generalize across both data formats (packets, messages, bytestreams) and device capabilities without sacrificing speed.
I'll discuss two systems to demonstrate this: EnsÅ, a streaming interface that delivers different data formats over the same design and achieves up to 6x speedup over a state-of-the-art NIC with an ad-hoc interface; and DCP, a general-purpose device communication protocol that lets devices communicate directly without routing through the CPU, cutting latency to as little as 17% of ad-hoc interfaces.
Presented in Partial Fullfillment of the CSD Speaking Skills Requirement