Mohammad Shahrad

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and an Associate Faculty Member of UBC's Department of Computer Science. My research focuses on building more efficient and sustainable 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 Sustainability (CIRRUS) Lab.

Openings in My Research Group

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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]

Conference Proceedings | Workshop Papers | Journal Papers | Preprints
  🏆: won an award |   ⚙️: deployed in production |   📰: major press coverage |   ✉️: invited

Conference Proceedings

1. Growlithe: A Developer-Centric Compliance Tool for Serverless Applications
   P. Gupta, A. Moghimi, D. Sisodraker, M. Shahrad, and A. Mehta
   46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P '25)
   Star   Fork   Download
2. The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling
   N. Bashir, V. Gohil, A. B. Subramanya, M. Shahrad, D. Irwin, E. Olivetti, and C. Delimitrou
   15th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '24)
3. Caribou: Fine-Grained Geospatial Shifting of Serverless Applications for Sustainability
   V. Gsteiger, P. H. Long, Y. Sun, P. Javanrood, and M. Shahrad
   30th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '24)
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4. Parrotfish: Parametric Regression for Optimizing Serverless Functions
   A. Moghimi, J. Hattori, A. Li, M. Ben Chikha, and M. Shahrad
   14th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '23)
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5. UnFaaSener: Latency and Cost Aware Offloading of Functions from Serverless Platforms 
   G. Sadeghian, M. Elsakhawy, M. Shahrad, J. Hattori, and M. Shahrad
   2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC '23)
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6. VectorVisor: A Binary Translation Scheme for Throughput-Oriented GPU Acceleration 
   S. Ginzburg, M. Shahrad, and M. Freedman
   2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC '23)
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7. 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)
8. 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)
9. 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.]
   Azure Functions Trace:   Star   Fork   Download
10. Architectural Implications of Function-as-a-Service Computing   
    M. Shahrad, J. Balkind, and D. Wentzlaff
    IEEE/ACM 52nd International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO '19)
    FaaSProfiler:   Star   Fork   Download
11. 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)
12. 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)
13. 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)
14. Symmetric Split-Row LDPC Decoders
    M. Shahrad and M. Shabany
    2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '17)
15. Availability Knob: Flexible User-Defined Availability in the Cloud   
    M. Shahrad and D. Wentzlaff
    7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '16)
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)
17. 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)
    OpenPiton:   Star   Fork   Download
18. 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)

Workshop Papers

1. Bridging the Sustainability Gap in Serverless through Observability and Carbon-Aware Pricing
   C. Lin and M. Shahrad
   3rd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems (HotCarbon '24)
2. 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)
3. 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)
4. 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)
5. 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

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

Preprints

1. Decomposing and Executing Serverless Applications as Resource Graphs   
   Z. Guo, Z. Blanco, M. Shahrad, Z. Wei, B. Dong, J. Li, I. Pota, H. Xu, and Y. Zhang
   arXiv:2206

Teaching

• Spring '25: CPEN 534 - Trade-offs in Designing Computer Systems, UBC
• Fall '24: CPEN 221 - Principles of Software Construction, UBC
• Spring '24: CPEN 534 - Trade-offs in Designing Computer Systems, UBC
• Fall '23: CPEN 221 - Principles of Software Construction, UBC
• Spring '23: EECE 571H - Trade-offs in Designing Computer Systems, UBC
• Fall '22: CPEN 221 - Principles of Software Construction, UBC
• Spring '22: EECE 571H - Trade-offs in Designing Computer Systems, UBC
• Fall '21: CPEN 221 - Principles of Software Construction, UBC
• Spring '21: COS375/ELE375 - Computer Architecture and Organization, Princeton University
• Fall '20: COS318 - Operating Systems, Princeton University

Selected Coverage on Research

Service

Conferences

USENIX ATC '25, PC Member | IISWC '24, General Co-Chair | MICRO '24, PC Member | USENIX ATC '24, PC Member | ASPLOS '24, PC Member | INFOCOM '24, Local Arrangements Co-Chair | Middleware '23, Industry Track PC Member | USENIX ATC '23, PC Member | ASPLOS '23, PC Member | ASPLOS '23, Local Arrangements Co-Chair | SoCC '22, PC Member | HPCA '22, ERC Member | Middleware '21, Industry Track PC Member | CASCONxEVOKE 2021, PC Member | HPCA '21, ERC Member | Middleware '20, Industry Track PC Member | SOSP '19, Artifact Evaluation Committee Member | EuroSys '19, Shadow PC Member | IMC '18, Shadow PC Member | ISCAS '17, Reviewer | ICECS '13, Reviewer

Workshops

SESAME @EuroSys'24 , PC Member | MLSys @NeurIPS '23, PC Member | Serverless Data Analytics (SDA) @VLDB '23, PC Member | SESAME @EuroSys'23 , PC Member | WORDS '22, PC Member | WORDS @ASPLOS'21, PC Member | YArch 2020 Workshop (ASPLOS), Publicity Co-chair

Journals

Journal of Systems Research (JSys), Serverless Computing Area Co-Chair | IEEE Micro, Reviewer | IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, Reviewer | IEEE Communications Magazine, Reviewer | IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (II), Reviewer