Akshitha Sriraman

Assistant Professor

Carnegie Mellon University

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments at Carnegie Mellon University. My research bridges computer architecture and software systems, demonstrating the importance of that bridge in enabling efficient, sustainable, and equitable web systems via solutions that span the compute stack.

Modern computer systems are, unfortunately, mostly either in the hands of the privileged or on the ground as e-waste in under-developed communities. This reality is due to the fact that traditionally, systems and architecture research, especially related to large-scale data center systems, often adopt a "performance-first" approach to ensure quick responses. While high performance is indeed critical, this approach does not consider the ethical implications of system design, and consequently compromises key metrics like sustainability and equity. For example, service operators upgrade hardware every 3-5 years to improve performance, increasing the carbon footprint from hardware manufacturing, hurting sustainability. Hence, it is critical to redesign high-performance web systems in a socially-responsible way.

My work redesigns the computing stack to enable sustainable and equitable web systems that also achieve high performance. My solutions have been deployed on real hyperscale systems and serve billions of users, saving millions of dollars and meaningfully reducing the global carbon footprint. Additionally, my hardware design proposals have influenced the design of Intel’s Alder Lake (Golden Cove and future generation) CPU architectures and Intel’s Infrastructure Processing Unit.

My research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award, the 2024 George Tallman Ladd Research Award, the 2023 Intel Rising Star Award, the 2022 ACM SIGARCH/TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award HM, the 2022 ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award HM, the 2022 BenchCouncil Distinguished Dissertation Award, the 2021 David J. Kuck Dissertation Prize, the 2021 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, a Meta Systems Research Award, and an IEEE Micro Top Picks distinction. I was awarded a Facebook Fellowship and was named a 2019 Rising Star in EECS.

Please note that this webpage represents only a snapshot of my research, teaching, mentorship, and service activities. Please refer to my CV for the latest details.

Note to prospective students: Due to the sheer volume of emails I receive from prospective students, I am, unfortunately, unable to respond individually to each student. If you are interested in working with me and are applying to the PhD program at CMU ECE or CS, please mention my name in your application and I will definitely take a look at it. If you are already a student at CMU, please email me your CV, your transcript, and some critical thoughts on why you are interested in working with me.

Education

PhD in Computer Science, 2021

University of Michigan
M.S. in Embedded Systems, 2015

University of Pennsylvania

Recent News

[July 2024] I won the George Tallman Ladd Research Award for outstanding research and professional accomplishments and potential

[July 2024] Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri presented a poster at OSDI 2024 on Studying Demographic Bias in Web Scheduling Systems. Congrats Sara!

[June 2024] I gave an invited keynote talk on "Debunking Myths About What it Takes to Pursue a PhD in CS" at the Undergraduate Architecture Mentoring Workshop (uArch), co-located with ISCA 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[June 2024] Jaylen Wang delivered a top-notch presentation on his work on Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon at ISCA 2024. Congrats Jaylen!

[June 2024] Our paper on Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon has been accepted for publication at ISCA! Congrats to Jaylen Wang, who is the sole student author on this work.

[May 2024] Our work on Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon appeared in the press!

[May 2024] I'm serving as a Program Committee member for HotCarbon. Submit your best work!

[Apr 2024] I was an invited contributor at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Workshop on Sustainable Computing for Sustainability.

[Apr 2024] My Master's student, Melissa Pan, has accepted a PhD offer from UC Berkeley! Congrats Melissa!

[Apr 2024] My undergraduate intern, Sriram Devata, has accepted a PhD offer from UIUC! Congrats Sriram!

[Apr 2024] My undergraduate intern, Deepanjali Mishra, has accepted a PhD offer from CMU! Super excited to work with Deepanjali.

[Mar 2024] Along with my PhD students, Jaylen Wang and Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri, I organized the First Workshop on Hot Topics in Ethical Computer Systems (HotEthics), co-located with ASPLOS 2024.

[Mar 2024] Jaylen Wang won the Jack and Mildred Bowers Scholarship in Engineering. Congrats Jaylen!

[Mar 2024] Edwin Lim won the Fritsch Family Fellowship in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Congrats Edwin!

[Mar 2024] Minya Rancic won the Hsu Chang Memorial Fellowship. Congrats Minya!

[Feb 2024] I gave an invited keynote talk on "Lifting the Systems Ostrich’s Head From the Sand: Introducing Ethical Systems" at the CSL Student Conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

[Jan 2024] I won the VMWare Faculty Award for my work on introducing ethical computer systems! Thanks VMWare!

[Jan 2024] Our work on Address Scaling: Architectural Support for Fine-Grained Thread-Safe Metadata Management has been published in the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters journal. Congrats Deepanjali!

[Dec 2023] I won the NSF CAREER Award!! Thanks NSF!

[Oct 2023] I gave an invited seminar talk on "Enabling Sustainable Web Systems" at the Meta Faculty Summit in Menlo Park, California.

[Oct 2023] I gave an invited seminar talk on "Enabling Sustainable Web Systems" at the NSF Workshop on Computer Systems Research in Durham, North Carolina.

[Sep 2023] I won the Intel Rising Star Award! Thanks Intel!

[Aug 2023] I was an invited speaker at the NSF Visioning Workshop on “Redefining the Future of Computer Architecture from First Principles”.

[July 2023] Our work on Towards Improved Power Management in Cloud GPUs has been published in the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters journal. Congrats Pratyush, Zibo, and Syeda!

[July 2023] Our work on Peeling Back the Carbon Curtain: Carbon Optimization Challenges in Cloud Computing has been published at HotCarbon! Congrats Jaylen!

[June 2023] I'm serving as the session chair for the "Datacenter Computing" session at ISCA 2023.

[June 2023] I (along with Prof. Swarun Kumar) won the CMU College of Engineering "Moonshot: Initiatives to Institute" Award! This grant is awarded for defining the next generation of bold research that tackles the most daunting problems and can evolve into future institutes

[June 2023] Jaylen presented our work on Giving Old Servers New Life at Hyperscale at the HotInfra workshop. Congrats Jaylen!

[May 2023] Jaylen Wang won the prestigious Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship HM! Congrats Jaylen!

[Apr 2023] My Master's student, Zibo Gong, has accepted a PhD offer from UIUC! Congrats Zibo!

[Apr 2023] My undergraduate intern, Hilbert Chen, has accepted a PhD offer from CMU! Congrats Hilbert!

[Apr 2023] I'm serving as a Program Committee member for ASPLOS 2024. Submit your best work!

[Apr 2023] Jaylen Wang won the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!! Congrats Jaylen!

[Apr 2023] I'm serving as a Program Committee member for SOSP. Submit your best work!

[Mar 2023] I served as the Program Committee Chair for the Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) ASPLOS session.

[Feb 2023] I gave a talk on "How to build your professional persona and networks?" at the Pittsburgh Women in Mathematics and Computing Symposium mentorship event.

[Feb 2023] Minya Rancic was recognized with the Phillips and Huang Family Fellowship in Energy for his work on designing energy-efficient data center hardware systems! Congrats Minya!

[Feb 2023] Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri won the CMU College of Engineering Presidential Fellowship! Congrats Sara!

[Jan 2023] Minya Rancic won the Julia Randall Weertman Award! Congrats Minya!

[Jan 2023] Jaylen Wang won the Benjamin Garver Lamme/Westinghouse Graduate Fellowship! Congrats Jaylen!

[Jan 2023] Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri was recognized with the Boeing Scholarship! Congrats Sara!

[Dec 2022] I started the "Student Council" for faculty candidate hiring at Carnegie Mellon University.

[Dec 2022] I won the BenchCouncil Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award !

[Nov 2022] I'm serving as a Program Committee member for ISCA. Submit your best work!

[Nov 2022] I won the ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention!

[Nov 2022] Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri won the prestigious K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship for her work on introducing ethical computer systems. Congrats Sara!

[Oct 2022] I co-organized the JOBS workshop (that I had initiated and led) at MICRO 2022.

[Oct 2022] Along with Prof. Baris Kasikci, Prof. Daniel Jimenez, and Prof. Heiner Litz, I won the Intel "Transformative Server Architecture" award for designing data-driven super-wide server architectures for emerging data center applications. Thanks Intel!

[Oct 2022] My undergraduate advisee, Hilbert Chen, bagged the bronze medal at the MICRO ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). Congrats Hilbert!

[Oct 2022] I gave an invited seminar talk on "Re-thinking Hardware Architectures for Data Center Applications from the Ground-up" at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

[Sep 2022] I won the Meta faculty award. Thanks Meta!

[Aug 2022] I won the Intel Arch SRS faculty award. Thanks Intel!

[Aug 2022] Minya Rancic won the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!! Congrats Minya!

[July 2022] I won the ACM SIGARCH/TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention!

[June 2022] I won the Meta Systems Research Award for designing efficient hyperscale web systems. Thanks Meta!

[June 2022] Our work on Thermometer: Profile-Guided BTB Replacement for Data Center Applications has been published in the International Symposium on Computer Architecture! Congrats Shixin, Tanvir, and Sara!

[Apr 2022] I won a Google Cloud Computing grant. Thanks Google!

[Apr 2022] I'm serving as a Program Committee member for ASPLOS 2023. Submit your best work!

[Apr 2022] My undergraduate intern, Shixin Song, has accepted a PhD offer from MIT! Congrats Shixin!

[Mar 2022] I co-organized the Young Architect Workshop (YArch) at ASPLOS.

[Oct 2022] I gave an invited seminar talk on "Re-thinking Hardware Architectures for Data Center Applications from the Ground-up" at Intel Labs.

[Mar 2022] I won the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award!

[Mar 2022] I gave an invited seminar talk on "Re-thinking Hardware Architectures for Data Center Applications from the Ground-up" at the University of California, Berkeley.

[Jan 2022] I'm serving as the Vice Chair of the Women in Computer Architecture (WiCArch) group, an organization that is very close to my heart.

[Jan 2022] I officially started (Assistant) Professoring at Carnegie Mellon University!

[Oct 2021] Our work on Twig: Profile-Guided BTB Prefetching for Data Center Applications has been published in the International Symposium on Microarchitecture. Congrats Tanvir and Nathan!

[Oct 2021] My undergraduate advisee, Shixin Song, bagged the gold medal at the MICRO ACM Student Research (SRC) competition. Congrats Shixin!

[Nov 2021] I won the David J. Kuck Dissertation Prize!

[Sep 2021] I'm serving on the IEEE Micro Top Picks Program Committee. Submit your best work!

[Sep 2021] I'm serving on the Eurosys 2022 Program Committee. Submit your best work!

[Sep 2021] My first Ph.D. student joins my research group (rather, spawns my research group!) Welcome, Mihailo Rancic!

[Sep 2021] I started as a Visiting Researcher at Google (in the new SRG group!)

[Aug 2021] I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Conference Papers

Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon

Jaylen Wang, Daniel S. Berger, Fiodar Kazhamiaka, Celine Irvene, Chaojie Zhang, Esha Choukse, Kali Frost, Rodrigo Fonseca, Brijesh Warrier, Chetan Bansal, Jonathan Stern, Ricardo Bianchini, Akshitha Sriraman. International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2024

ACM Badges: Artifact Available, Evaluated, and Reproduced
Evaluated under hyperscale cloud production constraints to save about 1% of global carbon emissions
Featured in Carnegie Mellon University News

DOI PDF Slides Code

Thermometer: Profile-Guided BTB Replacement for Data Center Applications

Shixin Song, Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Sara Mahdizadeh-Shahri, Akshitha Sriraman, Niranjan K Soundararajan, Sreenivas Subramoney, Daniel A Jiminez, Heiner Litz, Baris Kasikci. International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2022

PDF

Twig: Profile-Guided BTB Prefetching for Data Center Applications

Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Nathan Brown, Akshitha Sriraman, Niranjan K Soundararajan, Rakesh Kumar, Joseph Devietti, Sreenivas Subramoney, Gilles A Pokam, Heiner Litz, Baris Kasikci. International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Oct 2021

PDF

Ripple: Profile-Guided Instruction Cache Replacement for Data Center Applications

Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Dexin Zhang, Akshitha Sriraman, Joseph Devietti, Gilles A Pokam, Heiner Litz, Baris Kasikci. International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2021

PDF

I-SPY: Context-Driven Conditional Instruction Prefetching with Coalescing

Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Akshitha Sriraman, Joseph Devietti, Gilles A Pokam, Heiner Litz, Baris Kasikci. International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Oct 2020

PDF

Accelerometer: Understanding Acceleration Opportunities for Data Center Overheads at Hyperscale

Akshitha Sriraman, Abhishek Dhanotia. International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Mar 2020

Selected as an IEEE Micro Top Pick paper (awarded to the top 12 architecture papers of 2020)
Best Presentation Award
ACM Badges: Artifacts Available and Artifacts Evaluated & Functional
Influenced Intel's Infrastructure Processing Unit
Featured by TechXplore, Debuglies News, Michigan News, and Facebook Engineering

DOI PDF Slides Video Code

SoftSKU: Optimizing Server Architectures for Microservice Diversity @Scale

Akshitha Sriraman, Abhishek Dhanotia, Thomas F. Wenisch. International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2019

Deployed across a real global data center fleet
Influenced Intel's Alder Lake servers (Golden cove microarchitecture and beyond)
Featured by Facebook Engineering and Real World Technologies

DOI PDF Slides Poster Video

Enabling Hyperscale Web Systems

I’m looking to hire students

Akshitha Sriraman

Assistant Professor

About Me

Education

Recent News

Conference Papers

Journal Papers

Meet the Team

Principal Investigator

Assistant Professor

Researchers

PhD Candidate

Dissertation Title: Redesigning Hardware Architectures for Hyperscale Data Centers from the Ground-Up

PhD Candidate

Dissertation Title: Enabling Sustainable Hyperscale Systems

PhD Candidate

Dissertation Title: Introducing Equitable Web Systems

PhD Student

Dissertation Title: Communication and Compute for All

PhD Student

Dissertation Title: Salvaging Data Center Processors

We Believe There's More to Life Than Research

Contact