Computer systems are critical to today’s information infrastructure, providing efficient and convenient means for storing, accessing, and processing the world’s data, and leading to dramatic advances in commerce, technology, and entertainment. Furthermore, computers are deeply embedded in nearly all scientific endeavors, helping to enable breakthroughs in fields as diverse as astronomy, genomics, sustainability, and pharmaceutical drug development. Computer systems consists of software (applications, runtime systems, compilers, operating systems) and hardware (devices, circuits, logic, processors, memory, and storage) which together enable the engineering of massively complex systems, facilitated in large part through electronic design automation. Research in this area involves not just the design of these software and hardware components, but also computer architecture, which defines the interface between hardware and software.
