Abnash Bassi is a PhD student working with Prof. Akshitha Sriraman on enabling environmentally-sustainable data center systems. Her work bridges computer architecture and software systems, demonstrating the importance of that bridge in redesigning the data center systems stack to be more efficient and sustainable.

Today, critical societal and economic operations rely on web services running in data centers across millions of servers, at hyperscale. Enabling hyperscale services has become challenging due to an unprecedented growth in data, users, and service functionality. With the slowdown of Moore’s Law, modern computer systems address this challenge by either adding more general-purpose hardware or introducing specialized hardware accelerators. Unfortunately, such solutions significantly increase data centers’ total cost of ownership and are also not environmentally sustainable.

Abnash's work fundamentally redesigns the data center systems stack across hardware and software layers to efficiently and sustainably meet hyperscale services’ unprecedented needs, enabling advanced future services. Her research is the first to redesign the data center systems stack in a way that holistically considers environmental sustainability beyond carbon emissions, by accounting for e-waste, water footprint, and forever chemicals (PFAS).

Abnash's research has been recognized with the 2025 Carnegie Institute of Technology Dean’s Fellowship, 2024 Engineers for the World Award, 2021 Engineering Science Research Opportunities Program Grant, 2020 Top 25 Environmentalists Under 25 in Canada Award, and 2019-2024 Loran Scholarship.

Find out more about Abnash here.