HUSCARL

HUSCARL (Human-Centered System & Computer Architecture Lab), formerly known as the Scalable Architecture Lab, is a research lab in the Computer Science Department at William & Mary. HUSCARL is led by Dr. Yifan Sun. HUSCARL believes that computer systems and chips are designed by humans and for humans. HUSCARL bridges HCI and data visualization with chip design, building open-source simulators, visualization tools, and AI agents that help humans understand computer architectures and make architectures serve humans better.

Hiring

HUSCARL has no plan of hiring new Ph.D. students, research interns, or undergraduate research assistants in Spring 2026, Fall 2026 and Spring 2027.

Research Topics

Explainable Architecture
Explainable Architecture
Ever-increasing complex chip designs make them hard for humans to understand. If the designers cannot fully understand the architecture, the chip will inevitably contain hardware bugs, performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and security vulnerabilities. Therefore, we need to develop data visualization tools that help designers make well-informed and evidence-based decisions.
Computer Architecture Simulation
Computer Architecture Simulation
A cycle-based simulator is an essential tool for computer architecture researchers to validate their ideas. The community requires the simulators to be easy to learn, highly flexible, highly performant, and highly accurate. I am honored to take the challenge and contribute to the community with the Akita simulator framework and the MGPUSim multi-GPU simulator.
Multi-GPU and Wafer-Scale System Design
Multi-GPU and Wafer-Scale System Design
Single GPU systems struggle to meet the performance requirement. Therefore, researchers start to use large-scale multi-GPU systems to achieve extreme performance. Inter-GPU communication can easily kill the performance. I design architecture and system solutions for multi-GPU systems to avoid inter-GPU traffic and improve performance.

Sponsors

National Science Foundation logo
National Science Foundation
Advanced Micro Devices logo
Advanced Micro Devices
HUSCARL
Human-Centered System & Computer Architecture Lab
ISC 4 1365
540 Landrum Drive
Williamsburg, VA 23185
Resources
Branding
Website Designer
Yifan Sun