Mohammad Shahrad
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ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
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Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
Serverless computing is an emerging paradigm in cloud computing that revolutionizes application development. It introduces unique features such as a pay-per-use pricing model and the ability to scale down to zero. By shifting the responsibility for resource provisioning and administrative tasks to cloud providers, it frees developers from the complexities of resource management, allowing them to focus solely on code logic. However, despite the numerous advantages of serverless computing, there is a potential for decreased efficiency particularly when used in conjunction with other cloud services, raising environmental concerns. Recent data from leading cloud providers highlight compute servers, storage servers, and network equipment as significant sources of carbon emissions in cloud computing. Thus, there is a pressing need for enhanced resource efficiency, particularly in the context of serverless computing.This thesis addresses the resource and cost efficiency of today's serverless functions by minimizing the allocation footprint for serverless functions. The UnFaaSener framework is introduced, leveraging the underutilized capacity of non-serverless hosts to execute serverless functions. By using available underutilized resources within a user's non-serverless computational resources, the framework eliminates the need for cloud providers to allocate additional resources, thus mitigating potential resource overallocation for the serverless functions.Furthermore, this thesis explores the integration of the WebAssembly (Wasm) execution environment as the isolation mechanism for serverless functions. When serverless functions have the potential to be compiled into Wasm modules, unlike traditional containers, Wasm can enable the efficient packing of a larger number of modules onto the same isolation environment, maximizing resource efficiency through mitigating the considerable memory footprint associated with containers. The proposed techniques contribute to creating more efficient serverless applications for users, offering potential improvements in cost-effectiveness and performance.
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Publications
- Isocotoin suppresses hepatitis E virus replication through inhibition of heat shock protein 90 (2021)
Antiviral Research, 185, 104997 - On Merits and Viability of Multi-Cloud Serverless (2021)
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, - Provisioning Differentiated Last-Level Cache Allocations to VMs in Public Clouds (2021)
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, - Burstable Instances for Clouds: Performance Modeling, Equilibrium Analysis, and Revenue Maximization (2020)
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 28 (6), 2489--2502 - OpenPiton at 5: A Nexus for Open and Agile Hardware Design (2020)
IEEE Micro, 40 (4), 22--31 - Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider (2020)
2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 20), , 205--218 - Architectural Implications of Function-as-a-Service Computing (2019)
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, - OpenPiton (2019)
Communications of the ACM, 62 (12), 79--87 - Acoustic Denial of Service Attacks on Hard Disk Drives (2018)
Proceedings of the 2018 Workshop on Attacks and Solutions in Hardware Security, - Power and Energy Characterization of an Open Source 25-Core Manycore Processor (2018)
2018 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), - Incentivizing self-capping to increase cloud utilization (2017)
Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on Cloud Computing, - Piton: A Manycore Processor for Multitenant Clouds (2017)
IEEE Micro, 37 (2), 70--80 - Symmetric split-row LDPC decoders (2017)
2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), - Towards Deploying Decommissioned Mobile Devices as Cheap Energy-Efficient Compute Nodes (2017)
9th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud 17), - Availability Knob: Flexible User-Defined Availability in the Cloud (2016)
Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, - OpenPiton: An Open Source Manycore Research Framework (2016)
Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, - Piton: A 25-core academic manycore research processor (2016)
2016 IEEE Hot Chips 28 Symposium (HCS), - TTCN: A new approach for low-power split-row LDPC decoders (2015)
2015 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS),
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