PDL News

2024

November 2024
Sophia (Qingyang) Cao Wins ACM Student Research Competition at SOSP 2024!
Congratulations to Sophia on winning the ACM Student Research contest at SOSP this year. To participate, for the first round, she had to submit an abstract of her research. In the second round, semi-finalists had to present a poster detailing their research. In the final round she gave a presentation. Evaluations are based on the presenter’s knowledge of his/her research area, the contribution of the research, and the quality of the oral and visual presentation. Sophia's research on "Possum: A Tail of Dynamic Flash Capacity for Sustainability" investigates managing flash storage density for improved performance and device endurance.

September 2024
Sara McAllister Named 2025 Siebel Scholar
Congratulations to Sara (Ph.D. student, CSD) on becoming a Siebel Scholar! Her work on computer systems focuses on distributed, caching and storage systems, leveraging hardware-software co-design and grounding system design in mathematical modeling to enable more efficient and sustainable systems. McAllister also strongly supports diversity, equity and inclusion in computing. She co-created the CS-JEDI course (Intro to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Computer Science) course that is now required for the computer science Ph.D. program.

The Siebel Scholar program was founded in 2000 by the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation. It recognizes nearly 80 students each year whose work influences the technologies, policies, and economic and social decisions that shape the future.
-- info from CMU SCS News, Sept 20, 2024

September 2024
Dimitrios Skarlatos Recognized as Intel Rising Star
Congratulations to Dimitrios (Assistant Professor, SCS), who has been named an Intel Rising Star. His research bridges hardware and operating systems and delves into the core challenges of datacenter computing, addressing fundamental questions about scalability limitations, security vulnerabilities, and energy efficiency. His past work on memory management has tackled longstanding system design challenges at the interface of OS and hardware, which can severely impede server efficiency. His contributions at the algorithmic, OS, and hardware level have enabled highly efficient virtual memory and memory management for large-scale systems. These innovations have led to major gains in production data centers. Dimitiros’ work further extends into the domain of security at the intersection of OS and hardware. He has uncovered vulnerabilities in the software-hardware interface and has designed comprehensive hardware and OS mechanisms to reduce the attack surface of operating systems.

The Intel Rising Star Faculty Award (RSA) program acknowledges eight early-career academic researchers leading groundbreaking technology research and facilitates collaboration between award winners and leaders at Intel. Those selected conductresearch to find novel solutions to challenges spanning various topics, including artificial intelligence, computer architecture, quantum computing, manufacturing processing and packaging technology, security, and quantum photonics.
-- info from www.intel.com

July 2024
Akshitha Sriraman Receives George Tallman Ladd Research Award
Congratulations to Akshitha, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, on receiving the CMU College of Engineering George Tallman Ladd Research Award! The award is made each year to one or more assistant professors in the College of Engineering who have not yet been considered for promotion to Associate Professor. Selection of the recipient is made in recognition of outstanding research and professional accomplishments and potential. The award, named for George T. Ladd, a trustee of the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1938 until his death in 1943. The bequest of Ladd and his wife, Florence Barrett Ladd, formed a foundation that has funded faculty research in the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon for the past 70 years.
-- info from CMU College of Engineering

June 2024
PDL Paper Ties for Best Paper at SIGMETRICS '24!
Congratulations to PDL authors Mohammad Bakshalipour and Phil Gibbons on their award for Best Paper at Sigmetrics 2024, held in Venice, Italy this summer. The paper "Agents of Autonomy: A Systematic Study of Robotics on Modern Hardware" presents a systematic performance study of robotics on modern hardware and introduces RoWild, an open-source benchmark suite for robotics that is comprehensive and cross-platform, encompassing a broad range of robots, such as driverless vehicles, pilotless drones, and stationary robotic arms.

May 2024
PDL Students Win Qualcaomm Innovation Fellowship
Congratulations to PDL research partners Kaiyang Zhao (CS) and Hilbert (Yuang) Chen (ECE), who have been selected to receive a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for their work on Learned Virtual Memory for Heterogeneous Architectures.The project rethinks virtual memory using lightweight machine learning models to solve challenges in data centers and at the edge. Virtual memory has become a severe bottleneck due to the significant increase in memory-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence applications. The ambitious goal of the project is to provide a pliable abstraction that dynamically learns and adjusts based on the workload behavior and underlying hardware. The result will enable major performance and energy efficiency gains, and ultimately reduce the carbon footprint across edge devices and servers in data centers.

Students selected for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship earn a one-year fellowship and are mentored by Qualcomm engineers to facilitate the success of the proposed research. The fellowship comes with $100,000 to fund that research.
-- from CMU School of Computer Science News, Aaron Aupperlee, Tuesday, May 14, 2024

April 2024
Community Award for Best Paper at NSDI!
Congratulations to Juncheng Yang, Rashmi Vinayak and their co-author on having their paper selected to receive the Community award for Best Paper at NSDI! The paper, "SIEVE is Simpler than LRU: An Efficient Turn-Key Eviction Algorithm for Web Caches" discusses new caching and eviction algorithms to maximize efficiency, reducing the cache miss ratio. This is the team's second community award - they also won in 2021 for their paper "Segcache: A Memory-efficient and Scalable In-memory Key-value Cache for Small Objects."

February 2024
Nathan Beckmann Receives 2024 Sloan Fellowship
Congratulations to Nathan Beckmann, who has been named a Sloan Research Fellow of 2024. Among 126 early-career scholars, Nathan represents the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada. Nathan's current research focuses on building energy-efficient, general-purpose, post-Von Neumann computers, showing that systems can be both general-purpose and highly energy-efficient. More information about his research may be found here.

January 2024
Akshitha Sriraman Wins NSF Career Award!
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Akshitha Sriraman an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, a prestigious five-year grant given to junior faculty for research and education. Akshitha’s research bridges computer architecture and software systems, with a focus on making hyperscale data center systems more efficient, sustainable, and equitable via solutions that span the systems stack. Her work has developed the software and hardware foundations of hyperscale data center systems that support modern web services, such as web search, video streaming, and online healthcare.
-- from CMU ECE News, January 17, 2024

2023

November 2023
Sara McAllister Named EECS Rising Star!
PDL PhD student, Sara McAllister (Computer Science), advised by Nathan Beckmann and Greg Ganger was named an EECS Rising Star for her work exploring Efficient and Sustainable Data Retrieval Systems: Zettabytes of data, mostly stored in massive, hyperscale datacenters enable much of today's modern computing. However, datacenters are projected to account for 33% of the global carbon emissions by 2050. While most datacenters are moving to renewable energy, the majority of their emissions are not from energy generation, but rather from embodied emissions, generated from lifecycle events like manufacturing and mining raw materials. One key way to reduce embodied emissions is to increase device lifetime. Unfortunately, extending the lifetime of storage is challenging because storage hardware becomes less reliable with both lifetime and IO accesses. Their research focuses on how to reduce IO to enable longer storage-device lifetimes, thus enabling sustainable datacenter storage.

Rising Stars is an intensive workshop for graduate students and postdocs with historically marginalized or underrepresented genders who are interested in pursuing academic careers in electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence and decision-making. Launched at MIT in 2012, the annual event has since been hosted at the University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
-- info from https://eecsrisingstars2023.cc.gatech.edu

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