Prospective Students

We are actively recruiting new Ph.D. students. We are looking for highly motivated, hard-working students with interest in computer architecture or strong application-specific backgrounds who want to work on cross-layer optimizations from the application through the system to the hardware.

The DArchR group has a passion for open source software and reproducible research. We strive to make all of our research artifacts including both software and data open source (see our GitHub page for recent work). We are significant contributors to gem5, one of the most popular architectural simulation systems, and Prof. Lowe-Power is on the gem5 project management committee leading the community-driven effort. We are looking for students who will thrive in this open source culture.

Applying to UC Davis

The DArchR group is split across the Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments at UC, Davis.

More information on applying to the Computer Science Department can be found on their Recruiting Page. Applications are due by Jan 15th.

If you are interested in any of the projects below, or other computer architecture and computer systems research, feel free to reach out to Prof. Lowe-Power via email: jlowepower@ucdavis.edu. In your email, be sure in include in the subject [DArchR Recruiting] to avoid spam filters. Additionally, to stand out from the deluge of emails we receive, include a link to a paper, thesis, or project that you have worked on and include a review of the project (see below for how to write a review). If you haven’t worked on any large projects, you can write a short review of one of our papers or another paper that interests you published at ISCA, MICRO, ASPLOS, or HPCA. The review should contain a paragraph describing the problem and the solution contained in the paper, a paragraph describing the methods and results, and a paragraph describing what the new problems or next steps are for the research.

We are always looking for talented UC, Davis students to join our group. For students currently at UC, Davis, email Prof. Lowe-Power to set up a time to meet!

Specific project recruiting

In situ simulation

We are currently recruiting one or more students with a strong background in software development/engineering to create a new kind of architectural simulator which supports in situ simulation. In situ simulation will allow the applications under study run in their native environments while they are under study. In situ simulation will model the hardware at high fidelity and allow researchers to execute applications under study exactly the same as if they are running on a real system. In situ simulation will build off of a set of projects to improve gem5. See gem5 projects for more information.

Hardware-software co-design for high performance secure systems

Scientific computing periodically involves “sensitive” data that must be protected with increased levels of security, for example, to conform with terms imposed by private industry to protect proprietary data, and/or government regulations imposed to enforce the HIPAA Security Rule and/or U.S. Government export control or ITAR guidelines. This project will explore using trusted execution environments to run high performance computing applications with sensitive data, hardware extensions to improve the performance of trusted execution environments, and novel hardware architectures for processing sensitive data.