ArchAgent: Agentic AI-driven Computer Architecture Discovery

Agile hardware design flows are a critically needed force multiplier to meet the exploding demand for compute. Recently, agentic generative AI systems have demonstrated significant advances in algorithm design, improving code efficiency, and enabling discovery across scientific domains. Bridging these worlds, we present ArchAgent, an automated computer architecture discovery system built on AlphaEvolve. We show ArchAgent's ability to automatically design/implement state-of-the-art (SoTA) cache replacement policies (architecting new mechanisms/logic, not only changing parameters), broadly within the confines of an established cache replacement policy design competition. In two days without human intervention, ArchAgent generated a policy achieving a 5.3% IPC speedup improvement over the prior SoTA on public multi-core Google Workload Traces. On the heavily-explored single-core SPEC06 workloads, it generated a policy in just 18 days showing a 0.9% IPC speedup improvement over the existing SoTA (a similar "winning margin" as reported by the existing SoTA). ArchAgent achieved these gains 3-5x faster than prior human-developed SoTA policies. Agentic flows also enable "post-silicon hyperspecialization" where agents tune runtime-configurable parameters exposed in hardware policies to further align the policies with a specific workload (mix). Exploiting this, we demonstrate a 2.4% IPC speedup improvement over prior SoTA on SPEC06 workloads. Finally, we outline broader implications for computer architecture research in the era of agentic AI. For example, we demonstrate the phenomenon of "simulator escapes", where the agentic AI flow discovered and exploited a loophole in a popular microarchitectural simulator - a consequence of the fact that these research tools were designed for a (now past) world where they were exclusively operated by humans acting in good-faith.

MoCA: Memory-Centric, Adaptive Execution for Multi-Tenant Deep Neural Networks

Driven by the wide adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) across different application domains, multi-tenancy execution, where multiple DNNs are deployed simultaneously on the same hardware, has been proposed to satisfy the latency requirements of different applications while improving the overall system utilization. However, multi-tenancy execution could lead to undesired system-level resource contention, causing quality-of-service (QoS) degradation for latency-critical applications. To address this challenge, we propose MoCA, an adaptive multi-tenancy system for DNN accelerators. Unlike existing solutions that focus on compute resource partition, MoCA dynamically manages shared memory resources of co-located applications to meet their QoS targets. Specifically, MoCA leverages the regularities in both DNN operators and accelerators to dynamically modulate memory access rates based on their latency targets and user-defined priorities so that co-located applications get the resources they demand without significantly starving their co-runners. We demonstrate that MoCA improves the satisfaction rate of the service level agreement (SLA) up to 3.9x (1.8x average), system throughput by 2.3x (1.7x average), and fairness by 1.3x (1.2x average), compared to prior work.