Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri is a PhD Candidate working with Prof. Akshitha Sriraman on introducing equitable web systems. Her work bridges computer architecture and software systems, demonstrating the importance of that bridge in enabling efficient and equitable web services via solutions that span the compute stack.

Modern web services require data centers that scale to hundreds of thousands of servers, i.e., hyperscale. Traditionally, hyperscale web services have adopted a performance-first approach, where they prioritize sending quick responses to the end users. Indeed, Sara's earlier work presents hardware solutions to address important hardware performance bottlenecks imposed by hyperscale web services. However, building web systems using the performance-first approach often compromises key equity metrics. For example, web systems often improve performance by introducing request priorities/biases, which can compromise user-level equity. Sara's dissertation work is the first to introduce equity as a first-order hardware/software system design concern, to rethink the data center computing stack across hardware and software systems to enable efficient and equitable web services.

Sara's research has been recognized with the 2023 K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship, the 2023 CMU College of Engineering Presidential Fellowship, the 2023 Boeing Scholarship, the 2022 Carnegie Institute of Technology Dean's Fellowship, and the 2021 Rackham Merit Ph.D. Fellowship.

Find out more about Sara here.