Mohammad Shahrad
Research Classification
Research Interests
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Research Options
Recruitment
Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
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.
Supervision Enquiry
Graduate Student Supervision
Master's Student Supervision
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.
View record
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),
If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.