Michael Giardino

I’m a Principal Researcher at the Huawei Zürich Research Center in the Computing Systems Lab. My current research is centered in the cloud, especially around emerging system models involving serverless computing and disaggregation. I’m currently working on cloud-native hardware and programming models to enable more efficient use of modern (increasingly heterogeneous) computing resources. Having spent significant time researching non-volatile main memory (RIP Optane), I am excited to see techniques from heterogeneous memory being applied to future disaggregated and pooled memory systems, enabled by technologies such as CXL. Other interests involve power-aware computing, manycore systems, and cloud system co-design. I’m very interested in ethics in the computer science profession and why it’s in the (awful) state it is. Relatedly, I think a lot about the social and political implications of the technology we create, what future it provides, and how we should approach regulation, policy, etc.

I’m also an external lecturer at ETH Zürich, teaching seminars on Heterogeneous Computing, Computing Platforms, and Hardware Acceleration for Data Processing.

Before joining Huawei, I spent three and a half fantastic years with the Systems Group at ETH Zürich supervised by Timothy Roscoe, primarily working on the Enzian Project. It was here I began researching cloud systems, with a particular interest in serverless/function-as-a-service. I was also very fortunate to supervise many incredible bachelors’ and masters’ students.

I received my PhD and MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology supervised by my wonderful advisor Bonnie Ferri. My thesis was on application-guided power-aware control systems. I also spent time during my PhD at Intel in the Enterprise and Big Data group working with Kshitij Doshi. There I worked on non-volatile main memory both from operating system and database perspectives.

My bachelor’s degree is in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Orleans where I was fortunate enough to work with Dimitrios Charalampidis in two Research Experience for Undergraduate projects looking at computer vision.

In my free time I run (slowly), I play chess (poorly), and I spend time with my family (happily).