Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia
samirakhan@virginia.edu
434-982-2227
Rice Hall 308

I am an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at University of Virginia (UVa), where I lead the research group ShiftLab . Before joining UVa, I was a Post Doctoral Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, funded by Intel Labs and NSF GOALI award. I have recieved my PhD from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

I have open positions in my group for PhD students, interns, and post-docs. Please apply for the post-doc positions here.


Research

I am mainly interested in Computer Architecture and Computer systems, especially in building new systems by rethinking the traditional assumptions in abstraction and separation of responsibilities in different system layers and redesigning interfaces with new interaction and collaboration to solve systems/architecture research problems. My current research focuses on designing systems with scalable and high capacity main memory by rethinking two interfaces: (i) circuits and architecture, and (ii) architecture and operating system. My prior work focuses on improving performance, efficiency, and reliability of cache hierarchy.



Recent News

Feb 2021: NSF CAREER Award on In-Network Computation Meets Data Persistence. Watch out for the first work on this direction, PMNet at ISCA 2021.
Oct 2020: Google Rising Faculty Award in Recognition of Technical Leadership and Achievements in Systems Research! [slides]
Oct 2020: My PhD student Sihang Liu was awarded the Google PhD Fellowship 2020 for his research on persistent memory.
Oct 2020: Co-chairing NVMW 2021.
May 2020: Started my YT Channel Happy Hour with Architects.
Mar 2020: XFDetector (ASPLOS 2020) received Artifact Available and Artifact Evaluated – Functional badge from ACM.
Mar 2020: PMTest (ASPLOS 2019) nominated for NVMW 2020 Memorable Paper Award Finalist.
Feb 2020: PMTest (ASPLOS 2019) featured in PIRL Blog.
Jan 2020: Janus (ISCA 2019) awarded MICRO Top Picks 2020 Honorable Mention.
Sep 2018: Invited talk at ARM Research Summit 2018.
Sep 2018: 27M$ from SRC in CRISP Center, 1M$ from NSF for Persistent Cloud Systems.
Jan-Jun 2018: Serving as a program committee member for USENIX ATC 2019, SC 2019, and FCCM 2019.
Sep-Nov 2017: Talking about DRAM Scaling Challenge at UIUC, CMU, Stanford, UPenn, GaTech, UChicago, and MIT.
Aug 2017: Serving as a program committee member for ISCA 2018, USENIX ATC 2018.
Jan 2017: Serving as a program committee member for SC 2017, MICRO 2017, HPCA 2018, DATE 2018.
July 2016: Visiting Researcher at MSRA
April 2016: Speaker and Panelist at Beyond CMOS Workshop organized by ORNL.
January 2016: Serving as a program committee member for ICS 2016, SC 2016, MICRO 2016, IISWC 2016, HPCA 2017, ISPASS 2017, and DSN 2017 .
September 2015: Two Papers accepted in MICRO 2015
November 2015: Paper Accepted in HPCA 2015
February 2014: Paper accepted in SIGMETRICS 2014