An afternoon for researchers rethinking the boundary between hardware and operating systems, grounded in practical work with the Virtuoso simulation framework.
About the workshop and tutorial
Building on the success of our workshops at MICRO 2025 and ASPLOS 2026, we are excited to bring the Virtuoso Workshop to MICRO 2026 in Athens!
This third edition continues to explore the frontier of hardware/OS co-design for memory management, featuring new talks, updated demos, and fresh perspectives from leading researchers.
Traditional computing systems face significant challenges due to rigid interfaces between hardware and operating systems (OS). These interfaces struggle to meet the performance, efficiency, and security demands of modern applications. For example, the growth in data requirements has turned virtual memory (VM) into a major performance bottleneck.
This has led to a paradigm shift towards hardware/OS co-design, where hardware components and OS mechanisms are designed in tandem to optimize the system. This tutorial and workshop will provide a comprehensive introduction to this area, focusing on memory management.
A core component will be a hands-on exploration of Virtuoso, a simulation framework that enables rapid prototyping and evaluation of HW/OS co-designs. Published at ASPLOS 2025, Virtuoso provides a practical environment for attendees to experiment with co-design strategies and gain practical skills. The workshop is designed for students, engineers, and researchers in computer architecture and operating systems.
Outline
The 15:00 coffee break is shared with the other MICRO 2026 workshops. Session titles and speakers will replace the placeholders below as they are confirmed.
TentativeWe are assembling the invited talk lineup now. If you have recent or ongoing work on virtual memory, memory management, or cross-layer system design, we would like to hear about it.
Hands-on
The tutorial is designed around the actual research loop: understand the system, change one policy or mechanism, run a controlled experiment, and inspect the result. Everything runs on your own laptop or on a prepared cloud machine.
# Get the framework $ git clone --recursive https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Virtuoso.git $ cd Virtuoso/simulator/sniper $ sh run_example.sh
Attend
ETH Zurich
Recent PhD graduate from ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Onur Mutlu. Works at the intersection of hardware, software, and operating systems, focusing on performance, programmability, and security. Lead developer of Virtuoso.
Personal site
ETH Zurich
Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and head of the SAFARI Research Group. Designs energy-efficient, high-performance, and robust computing systems with an emphasis on computer architecture, hardware security, and memory. ACM and IEEE Fellow.
Personal siteA full day of invited talks on address translation, learned page tables, tiered memory, and cross-layer metadata, followed by a Virtuoso deep dive and guided demos.
The first workshop introduced HW/OS co-design for memory management, with talks on demand paging, prefetching, cloud-native architectures, and throughput processors, plus the first hands-on tutorial.