Name: School of CSE Ph.D. Student Max Hawkins

Date: Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025, at 12:00 p.m.

Location: Coda, Room 114 (Google Maps link)

Lunch provided!

Title: Back to Bits: Extending Shannon’s Communication Performance Framework to Computing

Abstract: This presentation proposes a novel measurement unit for computing performance grounded in information theory. Modern computing systems are increasingly diverse, supporting low-precision formats, hardware specialization, and emerging paradigms such as analog, quantum, and reversible logic. Traditional metrics like floating-point operation (flop) counts no longer accurately capture this complexity. Instead, I frame computing as the transformation of information through a channel and define performance in terms of the mutual information between a system’s inputs and outputs. This approach measures not just the quantity of data processed, but the amount of meaningful information encoded, manipulated, and retained through computation. The framework provides a principled, implementation-agnostic foundation for evaluating performance.

Bio: Max Hawkins is a CSE PhD student interested in computer performance evaluation, sustainable data center operation, and adapting hardware systems to each running workload. His previous experience in radio astronomy, analog hardware, and data center design compelled him to explore a more general approach to application-agnostic computing performance evaluation. This presentation covers the current state of his work on this topic. He is advised by Richard Vuduc and Spencer Bryngelson.

About HotCSE

HotCSE is an academic seminar series to bring Ph.D. students in Computational Science and Engineering together to discuss interesting topics. The topics consist of high-performance computing, machine learning, data analysis, simulation, computational sustainability, medical informatics, etc.

The talks have always been enjoyable and have ranged from quite informal to formal conference style talks. Either chalks or slides can be used to help people understand your talk. It is also a great forum to practice conference talks and bounce around new ideas.

Currently the talks are sponsored by the School of Computational Science and Engineering. The goal of CSE is slightly broader than that of these talks - we want to bring more people outside CSE to discuss their related work here.