I came back to school to study hardware after 5 years of doing ML

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2024-12-22 03:00:04

Building video recommendation systems was fun, and it was always interesting to see real-world metrics like playback time go up as a result of a better predictive model. Especially when I could see my own video recommendations improve.

However, after getting my hands dirty with some CUDA side projects, I was drawn to something more lower-level, and frankly, more concrete than ML:

I started to self-teach myself more CUDA, Triton, Pytorch Internals, … basically anything related to ML systems and compilers. One thing became crystal clear after doing so: all roads lead to hardware.

I just finished my first semester as a Master’s student in the ECE department at UIUC. And boy did I get close to the hardware.

This blog is about the jarring experience of jumping from Python to SystemVerilog, and general things I’ve felt being a student again.

In line with my reason returning back to school, I enrolled in “Computer Organization and Design”, numbered as ECE 411. Little did I know, I had bit off more than I could chew.