I am an 8th year PhD candidate at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE). Currently, I am completing my dissertation while working remotely from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) at the Parallel Systems Architecture (PARSA) lab.

My research interests are in the area of computer architecture, with particular emphasis on the design of efficient server systems. Ever-increasing computational demand has already pushed traditional and cloud datacenters to unsustainable extremes - tens of thousands of servers consuming megawatts of electrical power and occupying football-field sized warehouses. My primary research objective is to understand the fundamental properties and interactions of application software, operating systems, networks, processor microarchitecture, and datacenter dynamics, to enable software and hardware co-design of high-performance, power-efficient, and compact servers.

publications

CV

Michael Ferdman

Curriculum Vitae - May 2012

Research Interests

Computer architecture, with particular emphasis on the design of efficient server systems. My primary research objective is to understand the fundamental properties and interactions of application software, operating systems, networks, processor microarchitecture, and datacenter dynamics, to enable software and hardware co-design of high-performance, power-efficient, and compact servers.

Education

• Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA
• PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering June 2012 (expected)
• MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering December 2002
• BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering December 2002
• BS in Computer Science May 2002

Honors and Awards

• Best Paper Award at the 17th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems for "Clearing the Clouds: A Study of Emerging Scale-out Workloads on Modern Hardware."
• Best Paper Finalist at the 17th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture for “Cuckoo Directory: A Scalable Directory for Many-Core Systems.”
• Paper Award from the European Network of Excellence on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation (HiPEAC) for “Cuckoo Directory: A Scalable Directory for Many-Core Systems.”
• IEEE Micro Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences of 2009, “R-NUCA: Data Placement in Distributed Shared Caches.”
• IEEE Micro Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences of 2009, "Practical Off-chip Meta-data for Temporal Memory Streaming."
• 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge driverless desert race, 2nd and 3d place autonomous vehicles for RedTeam.

Publications

Teaching Assistantships

• Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland
• Advanced Topics on Memory Systems (graduate) Spring 2009 (Babak Falsafi)
• Multiprocessor Architecture (graduate) Fall 2008 (Babak Falsafi)
• Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA
• Multiprocessor Architecture (graduate) Spring 2006 (Babak Falsafi)
• Advanced Techniques in Microprocessors (PhD) Fall 2005 (Babak Falsafi)
• Operating Systems (undergraduate) Fall 2001 (Gregory Kesden)
• Embedded Systems (undergraduate) Fall 2001 (Raj Rajkumar)

Employment History

• Cadence Design Systems Pittsburgh, PA
• Software Engineer April 2004-August 2004
• Neolinear, Inc. (acquired startup) Pittsburgh, PA
• Software Engineer March 2003-April 2004
• VLSI CAD software implementation, troubleshooting, and maintenance
• Automatika, Inc. Pittsburgh, PA
• Independent Contractor September 2002-January 2003
• Wrote software for sensor data acquisition and wireless communication
• National Robotics Engineering Consortium Pittsburgh, PA
• Circuit Designer and Software Engineer February 2001-May 2002
• Worked in a small team to create a robot for underground gas pipe inspection for NY State Gas
• Designed micro-controller boards, real-time kernel, and software for communication, control, and vision

Professional Service

• Co-developer and public release manager of FLEXUS, a scalable, full-system, cycle-accurate multi-processor and multi-core simulation framework, currently in its 4th public release.
• External reviewer for HPCA’12, IISWC’11, MICPRO/DSD’11, ICS’11, ISCA’11, HPCA’11, HiPEAC’10, ISCA’10, HPCA’10, JPDC’09
• SIMFLEX and ProtoFlex: Fast, Accurate, and Flexible Simulation of Computer Systems Tutorial at
• 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC). Atlanta, GA, December 2010 with Eric Chung, Pejman Lotfi-Kamran, and Michael Papamichael.
• 42st Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO). New York, NY, December 2009 with Eric Chung and Michael Papamichael.
• 17th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), Toronto, Canada, October 2008 with Eric Chung and Nikos Hardavellas.
• Organizer of the Fall 2009 weekly seminar of the Systems Labs at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
• Organizer of the Fall 2007 weekly seminar of the Computer Architecture Lab at Carnegie Mellon (CALCM).
• Student member, IEEE Computer Society and ACM SIGARCH.

References

• Babak Falsafi (EPFL - babak.falsafi@epfl.ch)
• Anastasia Ailamaki (EPFL - anastasia.ailamaki@epfl.ch)
• Doug Burger (Microsoft Research - dburger@microsoft.com)
• Andreas Moshovos (University of Toronto - moshovos@eecg.toronto.edu)
• Todd C. Mowry (CMU - tcm@cs.cmu.edu)

personal

Travel

These days, it seems like everyone's favorite hobby is to travel. Below is a map which shows the countries I visited.