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Brian Towles

Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical andComputer Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical andComputer Engineering · 2022 - Present Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering

Recent Publications


Resiliency at Scale: Managing Google’s TPUv4 Machine Learning Supercomputer

Conference Proceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2024 · January 1, 2024 TPUv4 (Tensor Processing Unit) is Google’s 3rd generation accelerator for machine learning training, deployed as a 4096-node supercomputer with a custom 3D torus interconnect. In this paper, we describe our experience designing and operating the software i ... Cite

TPU v4: An Optically Reconfigurable Supercomputer for Machine Learning with Hardware Support for Embeddings

Conference Proceedings International Symposium on Computer Architecture · June 17, 2023 In response to innovations in machine learning (ML) models, production workloads changed radically and rapidly. TPU v4 is the fifth Google domain specific architecture (DSA) and its third supercomputer for such ML models. Optical circuit switches (OCSes) d ... Full text Cite

The Specialized High-Performance Network on Anton 3

Conference Proceedings - International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture · January 1, 2022 Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, a computationally intensive method that provides invaluable insights into the behavior of biomolecules, typically requires large-scale parallelization. Implementation of fast parallel MD simulation demands both high band ... Full text Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


Stanford University · 2005 D.Phil.