At the confluence of architecture and systems, my research focuses on building more efficient large-scale computing systems. I am an enthusiastic, hands-on researcher with experience in multiple layers of abstraction, from circuits to large-scale cloud systems. Currently, my primary research domain is cloud resource management, specifically for serverless workloads.
I will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor in July 2021. I am currently a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Prior to that, I completed my Ph.D. with Professor David Wentzlaff at Princeton's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. My dissertation was on resource-efficient management of large-scale public cloud systems.
I am hiring!
I am looking to hire PhD and Masters’ students from diverse backgrounds to join my group at UBC. If you are interested in my research areas, please reach out to me. More information on applying to the ECE Department at UBC can be found on the ECE admissions page and on the UBC Grad School admissions page. Also, here is a great guide by Prof. Sarah Nadi on how to contact potential supervisors.Why consider UBC for graduate school, aside from its research excellence?
Canada is ranked 1st in quality of life, and is 2nd overall in the Best Countries ranking. Vancouver is ranked 3rd globally in quality of living (the only North American city in the top 10). For those frequent travelers, Vancouver's airport has been ranked the best in North America for the past 11 years. UBC is the most beautiful Canadian university. Graduate school is a long ride. Choose a place where you'll be happy! :-)
Experience
Lecturer - 2020-2021
Department of Computer Science, Princeton University
Research Assistant - 2015-2020
Parallel Research Group, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University
Research Intern - Summer 2019
Microsoft Research Montréal
Research Intern - Spring 2018
Systems Research Group, Microsoft Research Redmond
Research Intern - Fall 2017
Systems Research Group, Microsoft Research Redmond
Research Intern - Summer 2013
Processor Architecture Laboratory (LAP), EPFL
Education
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering (2016-2020)
Princeton University, Princeton
Advisor: Prof. David Wentzlaff
M.A., Electrical Engineering (2014-2016)
Princeton University, Princeton
Advisor: Prof. David Wentzlaff
B.Sc., Electrical Engineering (2010-2014)
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran
Advisor: Prof. Mahdi Shabany. 1st rank of class of 2014 in Digital Systems major.
Publications
🏆: won an award
⚙️: deployed in production
📰: received major press coverage
✉️: invited article/paper
Conference Proceedings
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Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider 🏆⚙️📰
M. Shahrad, R. Fonseca, I. Goiri, G. Chaudhry, P. Batum, J. Cooke, E. Laureano, C. Tresness, M. Russinovich, and R. Bianchini
2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC '20)
[🏆 Received the Community Award at USENIX ATC '20.] -
Architectural Implications of Function-as-a-Service Computing
M. Shahrad, J. Balkind, and D. Wentzlaff
IEEE/ACM 52nd International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO '19)
Star Fork Download -
Burstable Instances for Clouds: Performance Modeling, Equilibrium Analysis, and Revenue Maximization
Y. Jiang, M. Shahrad, D. Wentzlaff, D. Tsang, and C. Joe-Wong
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM '19) -
Power and Energy Characterization of an Open Source 25-core Manycore Processor
M. McKeown, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, P. Jackson, Y. Fu, J. Balkind, T. Nguyen, K. Lim, Y. Zhou, and D. Wentzlaff
24th IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA '18) -
Incentivizing Self-Capping to Increase Cloud Utilization
M. Shahrad, C. Klein, L. Zheng, M. Chiang, E. Elmroth, and D. Wentzlaff
8th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '17) -
Symmetric Split-Row LDPC Decoders
M. Shahrad and M. Shabany
2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '17) -
Availability Knob: Flexible User-Defined Availability in the Cloud
M. Shahrad and D. Wentzlaff
7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '16) -
Piton: A 25-core Academic Manycore Processor 📰
M. McKeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, Y. Zhou, J. Balkind, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, S. Payne, and D. Wentzlaff
2016 IEEE Hot Chips 28 Symposium (HCS) -
OpenPiton: An Open Source Manycore Research Framework
J. Balkind, M. McKeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, Y. Zhou, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, A. Fuchs, S. Payne, X. Liang, M. Matl, and D. Wentzlaff
21st International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '16)
Star Fork Download -
TTCN: A New Approach for Low-Power Split-Row LDPC Decoders
M. Shahrad and M. Shabany
2015 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '15)
Journal Papers
-
Isocotoin suppresses hepatitis E virus replication through inhibition of heat shock protein 90
I. Nimgaonkar, N. F. Archer, I. Becher, M. Shahrad, R. A. LeDesma, A. Mateus, J. Caballero-Gómez, A. R. Berneshawi, Q. Ding, F. Douam, J. M. Gaska, M. M. Savitski, H. Kim, and A. Ploss
Antiviral Research, January 2021 (Vol. 185) -
Characterization and Optimization of the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider ✉️
M. Shahrad, R. Fonseca, I. Goiri, G. Irfan, and R. Bianchini
USENIX ;login:, Winter 2020 (Vol. 45, No. 4) -
Burstable Instances for Clouds: Performance Modeling, Equilibrium Analysis, and Revenue Maximization
Y. Jiang, M. Shahrad, D. Wentzlaff, D. Tsang, and C. Joe-Wong
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), December 2020 (Vol. 28, Iss. 6) -
OpenPiton at 5: A Nexus For Open And Agile Hardware Design
J. Balkind, T. Chang, P. Jackson, G. Tziantzioulis, A. Li, F. Gao, A. Lavrov, G. Chirkov, J. Tu, M. Shahrad, and D. Wentzlaff
IEEE Micro, July/Aug 2020
-
OpenPiton: an Open Source Hardware Platform for Your Research ✉️
J. Balkind, M. McKeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, Y. Zhou, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, A. Fuchs, S. Payne, X. Liang, M. Matl, and D. Wentzlaff
Communications of the ACM (CACM), December 2019
-
Piton: A Manycore Processor for Multi-Tenant Clouds
M. McKeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, Y. Zhou, J. Balkind, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, S. Payne, and D. Wentzlaff
IEEE Micro, March/April 2017
Workshop Papers
-
OpenPiton: An Emerging Standard for Open-Source EDA Tool Development
J. Balkind, A. Lavrov, M. McKeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, M. Shahrad, et al.
2018 Workshop on Open-Source EDA Technology (WOSET '18) -
Acoustic Denial of Service Attacks on Hard Disk Drives 📰
M. Shahrad, A. Mosenia, L. Song, M. Chiang, D. Wentzlaff, and P. Mittal
2018 ACM CCS Workshop on Attacks and Solutions in Hardware Security (CCS ASHES '18) -
Towards Deploying Decommissioned Mobile Devices as Cheap Energy-Efficient Compute Nodes 📰
M. Shahrad and D. Wentzlaff
9th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud '17) -
Designing a Complex 25-Core Academic Processor
D. Wentzlaff, M. Mckeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, Y. Zhou, J. Balkind, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, and S. Payne
2015 6th Workshop on Architectural Research Prototyping (WARP), Portland
Teaching
- Spring 2021: COS375/ELE375 - Computer Architecture and Organization, Princeton CS
- Fall 2020: COS318 - Operating Systems, Princeton CS
Invited Talks & Presentations
-
Serverless Computing, The Forthcoming Wonderland
Waterloo-Huawei Joint Innovation Lab Roundtable on Serverless Computing - August 2020 -
The Quest for Efficient Serverless Computing
- Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough - May 2020
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University - April 2020
- School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh - April 2020
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia - April 2020
- IBM Toronto Lab - April 2020
- School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University - March 2020
-
Opening the Gates to Serverless Wonderland
Microsoft Research Lab (MSR), Redmond - April 2020 -
Architectural Implications of FaaS Computing [+ video]
OpenWhisk Technical Interchange Call - October 2019 -
Serverless Computing, An Architectural Perspective
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo - October 2019 -
Improving the Efficiency of Public Clouds through Enhanced Service Flexibility
School of Computer Science, McGill University - January 2019 -
Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining
Department of Computer and Software Engineering (GIGL), École Polytechnique de Montréal - January 2019 -
Improving the Efficiency of Cloud Systems through Enhanced Service Flexibility
Center for Networked Computing (CNC), Temple University - September 2018 -
Provisioning Flexible Availability in IaaS Clouds
NEC Laboratories America, NJ - December 2016