The Alumni Research Talk, held on the 17th of January, 2020, was organized by the Computer Science Association (CSA) in collaboration with Alumni Relations Club (ARC) and featured two alumni—Dr Guri Sohi, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr Deepak Poola Chandrashekhar, the Industry Expert for the Departmental Academic Committee at NIT Raipur. Each talk focused on the area of expertise of the respective alumnus. 

Dr Guri Sohi’s talk was centered around his research in the design of high-performance microprocessors and computer systems. The talk started off with Dr Sohi elaborating on Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP), its limitations, and how dynamic ILP—considered mostly academic in the late 1980s—has evolved into being used extensively in every mobile, desktop, and laptop processor. He went on to explain the role of speculation in computer architecture and presented an example of control speculation. Dr. Sohi elaborated on the evolution of computing and how one can keep up with the extensive changes taking place in the industry. 

He moved on to the topic of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and talked about how they are being used for mapping application software and deep learning (Alexnet). The latter part of the talk dealt with the increasing role of specialized processors, especially in the case of building hardware for artificial intelligence. Dr Sohi wrapped up his talk with a quick question and answer session. One student proposed building universal hardware to keep up with the sophisticated software; Dr. Sohi acknowledged this idea but also mentioned its shortcomings and suggested alternatives.

Dr Deepak Poola Chandrashekhar talked about cloud computing and shared the knowledge he had amassed through his work at IBM as a Cloud Solutions Architect. After briefly touching upon the basic definition of cloud computing, he moved on to explain how the field has evolved from cluster computing in the 1960s. He also spoke on grid computing and explained its uses in ATM banking, back-end infrastructure, and scientific marketing research.  Dr Poola spoke at length about the various delivery models in cloud computing—Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service.

Dr. Poola addressed the current state of cloud computing and what we can expect in the future. He elaborated on the potential benefits which prompted companies to start using cloud computing and highlighted some of the challenges one can expect to face in the field—reliability, security and privacy, distributed cloud, and software-defined network. Finally, Dr. Poola discussed what the future of cloud computing might look like— IoT, micro-services, nano-services, Knative, and service mesh were some of the key features. The talk was followed by a question and answer session in which Dr. Poola provided advice on securing better employment opportunities. According to him, Kubernetes skills are in demand and gaining knowledge in the domain would help boost career opportunities.

The session came to an end with a vote of thanks for the two alumni.