About Me

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Princeton's Department of Electrical Engineering, and a member of the Princeton Parallel Research Group advised by Professor David Wentzlaff.
My work focuses on building more efficient large-scale computing systems by merging Computer Architecture, Computer Systems, and Economics. I am an enthusiastic hands-on engineer with experience in multiple layers of abstraction, from circuits to large-scale cloud systems.

Experience

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Research Assistant, Princeton Parallel Research Group

Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA (Spring 2018)
Research Intern, Systems Research Group

Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA (Fall 2017)
Research Intern, Systems Research Group

EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (Summer 2013)
Research Intern, Processor Architecture Laboratory (LAP)

Education

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering (Ongoing)
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

  1. 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)
  2. 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)
  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. Symmetric Split-Row LDPC Decoders
    M. Shahrad and M. Shabany
    2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '17)
  5. 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
  6. Availability Knob: Flexible User-Defined Availability in the Cloud   
    M. Shahrad and D. Wentzlaff
    7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '16)
  7. 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)
  8. 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)
  9. 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
  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)

Pre-prints

  1. Acoustic Denial of Service Attacks on HDDs
    M. Shahrad, A. Mosenia, L. Song, M. Chiang, D. Wentzlaff, and P. Mittal

Selected Press Coverage on Research