About Me

I am a PhD student at Penn State CSE, working with Professor Aasheesh Kolli. I am interested in the broad areas of operating systems and computer architecture at datacenter scale.

Links:
Curriculum Vitae (Sep 2020)
LinkedIn
Github

Research

Serverless

I am exploring approaches for scheduling and orchestration of serverless applications from a cloud provider’s perspective. I am currently developing a configurable testbed for meaningful and reproducible serverless experiments on actual clusters comprising cluster managers, open-source serverless frameworks, cloud infrastructure services, distributed load generators and representative real-world serverless applications.

Disaggregated Systems

We are developing a transparent remote memory system without any kernel modifications using Linux user-space page faults to improve portability and adaption of disaggregated systems (collaboration with VMware Research). We also characterized full-scale real-world applications to glean requirements for a transparent fine-grained remote memory system.

HW Accelerator Programmability

We devised an analysis methodology to characterize machine learning hardware accelerators’ software-backend development costs arising from hardware design complexity.

News

• 05/20: Summer Research Internship @ VMware Research Group
• 05/19: Summer Research Internship @ Facebook, Menlo Park (AI HW/SW Codesign Team)
• 02/19: Presented “Rethinking Resource Disaggregation” @ Young Architect Workshop, HPCA’19
• 08/18: Started Grad School @ Penn State CSE

Background

I am a technology enthusiast – intrigued by the utility, organization and implementation of everything with a digital heartbeat.

I have long been interested in bridging the hardware and software worlds. This has led me to pursue Robotics in undergrad, followed by developing low-level JTAG interfaces with embedded boards at Siemens (formerly Mentor Graphics), leading up to my current endeavors with Systems and Computer Architecture. I am intrigued by complexity of datacenter scale systems and how recent computing paradigms (like serverless) and technologies (like RDMA) can improve efficiency and resource utilization.

Food, travel, world affairs, movies and sometimes cars devour my attention occasionally as I attempt to attain some balance with lighter side of life. (more stuff here)

Contact

Email: timran -AT- psu -DOT- edu 

Address:
W209 Westgate Building,
University Park, PA, 16802