
Allen School Colloquium: Productively Programming Accelerated Computing Systems
Rohan, a Stanford PhD and NVIDIA researcher, outlined his work on making high-performance accelerated and distributed computing systems easier to program as hardware grows more heterogeneous and complex. He described a full‑stack approach: high‑level composable distributed libraries that present familiar interfaces (like NumPy) while automatically scaling across clusters; distributed runtime techniques to compose and orchestrate computations efficiently and correctly; and low‑level systems for writing high‑performance kernels across accelerators. He highlighted the Distl compiler for dense and sparse distributed tensor algebra as a concrete example of this strategy. Overall, his research targets both single‑node accelerator specialization and the orchestration challenges of large hierarchical supercomputers.

2026 Winter Robotics Colloquium: Aaron Borger (Orbital Robotics)
Aaron Borger, co‑founder and CEO of Orbital Robotics, presented the company’s vision for AI‑controlled robotic arms that can capture, refuel, repair, or de‑orbit spacecraft in orbit. The firm aims to provide space‑grade hardware and integrated software to any satellite...