Speaker: Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Google DeepMind
The Architect and the Agent: Searching for the AlphaZero of System Design
In 2017, AlphaZero revolutionized strategy games by discovering counterintuitive tactics entirely free from human bias. A similar inflection point is now emerging in computer systems, where evolutionary coding agents are autonomously discovering novel optimization heuristics. This talk explores this paradigm shift across the computing stack, starting with how AI generates new microarchitectural hardware prefetchers. We then examine an agentic framework that synthesizes compiler optimization passes that outperform decades of manual tuning, before exploring how similar techniques scale to high-level code optimization for warehouse-scale datacenters. Finally, I will discuss my thoughts on this inflection point’s trajectory, the major evaluation and simulation challenges we face, and why I believe a true AlphaZero moment for system design is inevitable.
Speaker Bio
Amir Yazdanbakhsh (https://www.ayazdan.com/) is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where his work bridges the critical intersection of machine learning and computer architecture. His primary research interests encompass machine learning for systems, automated code generation, and developer efficiency. Prior to DeepMind, Dr. Yazdanbakhsh completed the Google Brain AI Residency, where he developed scalable reinforcement learning systems for complex real-world tasks and applied machine learning to accelerator design. His work in hardware-software co-design has driven significant industry innovation, directly shaping multiple headline hardware features across several generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Dr. Yazdanbakhsh is an ISCA Hall of Fame inductee, and his research has earned multiple IEEE Micro Top Picks distinctions, CACM Research Highlights nominations, and Distinguished Paper Awards. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and was awarded the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship and the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.