Research

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

My research interests are broadly in the area of hardware/software co-designed systems. Within this theme, I have worked on system-level solutions targeting fault tolerance, performance of general purpose processors, and complex video applications.

In my current role, I design high performance software by understanding nuances of the underlying hardware and by exploiting them to achieve higher performance. I head a team of talented engineers working on problems in video processing, including designing and building encoders, and decoders for a variety of standards such as AVC, HEVC, AV1. In particular, my team is responsible for the open-source x265 project.

My work at Intel focussed on inventing bleeding edge technology to deliver elevated end-user performance in next generation Intel processors. I have worked on several aspects of Intel’s 6th generation processor, code-named Skylake including pre-Silicon performance modeling, performance validation, and post-Silicon tuning.

For my PhD dissertation, I have developed a low-cost architecture-level solution called SWATthat uses a simple set of low-cost monitors to detect hardware faults by watching for anomalous software execution. SWAT’s recovery module, which handles recovery in the presence of I/O, is developed in tandem with its detectors, ensuring minimal impact on fault-free execution. SWAT also has a sophisticated diagnosis module that distinguishes between software bugs, transient hardware faults, and permanent hardware faults.

Publications