Michael Giardino

Principal Researcher - Computing Systems Lab - Zürich Research Center - Huawei Technologies

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Huawei Technologies Switzerland

Zürich Research Center

Thurgauerstrasse 80

8050 Zürich, Switzerland

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).

news

Mar 27, 2024 I’m happy to share that the paper Serverless? RISC more! with Roberto Starc, Tom Kuchler, and Ana Klimovic has been accepted to SESAME. This work is based off Roberto’s master’s thesis. I look forward to talking about it at Eurosys 2024. See you in Athens!
Jan 14, 2024 I’m thrilled to announce that our paper Skip It: Take Control of Your Cache! has been accepted at ASPLOS 2024! Thank you to my co-authors Shashank Anand, Michal Friedman, and Gustavo Alonso. And a special congratulations to Shashank for finishing his Master’s degree at ETH with a bang! Fanastic work on this paper, which I’m sure will be the first of many more. See you in La Jolla!
Nov 15, 2023 The ACM Kudos (?) for our paper Function as a Function is now live.
Oct 31, 2023 Our paper Function as a Function was presented by Tom at Symposium on Cloud Computing in Santa Cruz, USA!
Oct 21, 2023 Looking forward to seeing everybody at SOSP in Koblenz! Excited to read about XFaaS and Google’s RPC analysis. Also, come by the Huawei booth.