CSE alum Akshitha Sriraman’s dissertation recognized by SIGARCH/TCCA

CSE alum Akshitha Sriraman has been awarded an Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) and Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) for her dissertation, “Enabling Hyperscale Web Services.” The award recognizes excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of computer architecture, with an emphasis on technical depth and significance of the research contribution, potential impact on computer architecture, and quality of presentation.

Sriraman’s dissertation explores how to bridge computer architecture and software systems to tackle new challenges posed by massive web services, such as social media, online messaging, web search, video streaming, gaming, and online banking. These services serve billions of users and require data centers that scale to hundreds of thousands of servers. Services and data centers of this size are often called hyperscale.

In her dissertation, Sriraman presented technologies to enable these growing services to handle the massive user load while still offering good performance, cost, and energy efficiency. She tackled two key challenges facing hyperscale web services – the rapid, sudden growth of data and user base, and the decline in hardware performance scaling.

Her dissertation was previously recognized with the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award and David J. Kuck Dissertation Prize.

Sriraman is now an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. There, she continues her work on designing software that is aware of new hardware constraints/possibilities and architecting hardware that efficiently supports hyperscale software requirements. She was advised by Prof. Thomas Wenisch.