Mohammad Shahrad

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. 1^st 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

1. 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.]
2. 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
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 International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM '19)
4. 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)
5. 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)
6. Symmetric Split-Row LDPC Decoders
   M. Shahrad and M. Shabany
   2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '17)
7. Availability Knob: Flexible User-Defined Availability in the Cloud   
   M. Shahrad and D. Wentzlaff
   7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '16)
8. 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)
9. 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
10. 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 2021: COS375/ELE375 - Computer Architecture and Organization, Princeton CS
• Fall 2020: COS318 - Operating Systems, Princeton CS

Selected Press Coverage on Research

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

Services

Conferences

WORDS 2021 (ASPLOS), Program Committee Member HPCA '21, External Review Committee (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 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