Mohammad Shahrad

I am an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of British Columbia (UBC). At the confluence of systems and architecture, 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. My primary research domain is cloud resource management, more recently in the context of serverless systems. I lead the UBC Cloud Infrastructure Research for Reliability, Usability, and Scalability (CIRRUS) Lab.

I am hiring! See this page for more details.

Recent news:

• August '21 - Two papers accepted to SoCC '21.
• July '21 - Visited University of Waterloo virtually to give an invited talk at the Systems and Networking Seminar.
• May '21 - Honored to give a keynote at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Serverless Computing!
• April '21 - Excited for my accepted Discovery Grant proposal! Thank you NSERC!
• March '21 - Thank you IBM CAS Canada for awarding my proposal!

Experience

Assistant Professor (2021-Present)
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia

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: Professor David Wentzlaff
Dissertation: Resource-Efficient Management of Large-Scale Public Cloud Systems

M.A., Electrical Engineering (2014-2016)
Princeton University, Princeton
Advisor: Professor David Wentzlaff

B.Sc., Electrical Engineering (2010-2014)
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran
Advisor: Professor Mahdi Shabany. 1^st rank of class of 2014 in Digital Systems major.

Publications   [Scholar] [DBLP]

  🏆: won an award
  ⚙️: deployed in production
  📰: received major press coverage
  ✉️: invited article/paper

Conference Proceedings

1. On Merits and Viability of Multi-Cloud Serverless   
   A. Fatahi Baarzi, G. Kesidis, C. Joe-Wong, and M. Shahrad
   12th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '21)
2. Provisioning Differentiated Last-Level Cache Allocations to VMs in Public Clouds   
   M. Shahrad, S. Elnikety, and R. Bianchini
   12th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '21)
3. 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.]
4. Architectural Implications of Function-as-a-Service Computing   
   M. Shahrad, J. Balkind, and D. Wentzlaff
   IEEE/ACM 52nd International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO '19)
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5. 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)
6. 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)
7. 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)
8. Symmetric Split-Row LDPC Decoders
   M. Shahrad and M. Shabany
   2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '17)
9. Availability Knob: Flexible User-Defined Availability in the Cloud   
   M. Shahrad and D. Wentzlaff
   7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '16)
10. 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)
11. 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)
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12. 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

1. 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)
2. 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)
3. 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)
4. 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
   
5. 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
   
6. 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

1. 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)
2. 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)
3. 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)
4. 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 2022 (coming): EECE 571H - Trade-offs in Designing Computer Systems, UBC
• Fall 2021 (coming): CPEN 221 - Principles of Software Construction, UBC
• Spring 2021: COS375/ELE375 - Computer Architecture and Organization, Princeton CS
• Fall 2020: COS318 - Operating Systems, Princeton CS

Selected Press Coverage on Research

Services

Conferences

HPCA '22, ERC Member | Middleware '21, Industry Track PC Member | CASCONxEVOKE 2021, PC Member | WORDS 2021 (ASPLOS), PC Member | HPCA '21, ERC Member | Middleware '20, Industry Track PC Member | YArch 2020 Workshop (ASPLOS), Publicity Co-chair | SOSP '19, Artifact Evaluation Committee Member | EuroSys '19, Shadow PC Member | IMC '18, Shadow PC Member | ISCAS '17, Reviewer | ICECS '13, Reviewer

Journals

Journal of Systems Research (JSys), Serverless Computing Area Co-Chair IEEE Communications Magazine, Reviewer IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, Reviewer Springer Cluster Computing Journal, Reviewer Springer Journal of Grid Computing, Reviewer Elsevier Parallel Computing Journal, Reviewer IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (II), Reviewer