I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State University. I lead the Architecture Research Lab. Our research interests include computer architecture, energy efficient computing, security and reliability.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I was a member of the IACOMA group working with Prof. Josep Torrellas. I was the recipient of the Ohio State CSE Department Teaching Award in 2021, the Lumley Award in 2014, an NSF CAREER award in 2012, Intel Foundation Fellowship for 2007-2008 and the W. J. Poppelbaum Award for 2008.
I was happy to help organize MICRO-52 in Columbus, Ohio in October 2019.
Thrilled to be a part of the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, a SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 center. I am leading the Security, Privacy and Correctness Theme, devising novel technologies for evolvable and scalable distributed computing.
I am looking for motivated students to join my research group. For more details and research updates please visit my group’s website. If you are interested in working with us send me an email or drop by my office.
Select publications:
- *new* TEESec: Pre-Silicon Vulnerability Discovery for Trusted Execution Environments, 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 17–21, 2023 [pdf]
- *new* ENCLYZER: Automated Analysis of Transient Data Leaks on Intel SGX, 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED), September 2022 [pdf]
- *new* A Systematic Look at Ciphertext Side Channels on AMD SEV-SNP, 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), May 2022 [pdf]
- *new* A Pre-Silicon Approach to Discovering Microarchitectural Vulnerabilities in Security Critical Applications, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL), vol. 01, pp. 9-12, January 2022. [pdf] Best of CAL 2022
- Using Undervolting as an On-Device Defense Against Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks, IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), December 2021
- IntroSpectre: A Pre-Silicon Framework for Discovery and Analysis of Transient Execution Vulnerabilities, International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2021
- RNNFast: An Accelerator for Recurrent Neural Networks Using Domain Wall Memory, ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, (JETC) 2020
- SPEECHMINER: A Framework for Investigating and Measuring Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2020
- SpecShield: Shielding Speculative Data from Microarchitectural Covert Channels, International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), MICRO Top Picks 2019 honorable mention
- Isolating Speculative Data to Prevent Transient Execution Attacks, Computer Architecture Letters (CAL), 2019, Best of CAL 2019
- Adaptive parallel execution of deep neural networks on heterogeneous edge devices, ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing, (SEC), 2019
- NVCool: When Non-Volatile Caches Meet Cold Boot Attacks, IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), 2018
- Respin: Rethinking Near-Threshold Multiprocessor Design with Non-Volatile Memory, IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), May 2017
- Snatch: Opportunistically Reassigning Power Allocation between Processor and Memory in 3D Stacks, International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), October 2016
- One Bit Flips, One Cloud Flops: Cross-VM Row Hammer Attacks and Privilege Escalation, USENIX Security'16, August 2016
- EmerGPU: Understanding and Mitigating Resonance-Induced Voltage Noise in GPU Architectures, International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), April 2016
- Core Tunneling: Variation-Aware Voltage Noise Mitigation in GPUs, International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), March 2016, nominated for Best Paper Award
- Authenticache: Harnessing Cache ECC for System Authentication, International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), December 2015, MICRO Top Picks 2015 honorable mention
- Using ECC Feedback to Guide Voltage Speculation in Low-Voltage Processors, International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), December 2014
- NVSleep: Using Non-Volatile Memory to Enable Fast Sleep/Wakeup of Idle Cores, IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), October 2014
- Dynamic Reduction of Voltage Margins by Leveraging On-chip ECC in Itanium II Processors, International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2013
- VRSync: Characterizing and Eliminating Synchronization-Induced Voltage Emergencies in Many-core Processors, International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2012
- Booster: Reactive Core Acceleration for Mitigating the Effects of Process Variation and Application Imbalance in Low-Voltage Chips, International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), February 2012
- StVEC: A Vector Instruction Extension for High Performance Stencil Computation, International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), October 2011
- Parichute: Generalized Turbocode-Based Error Correction for Near-Threshold Caches, International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), December 2010
- Variation-Aware Application Scheduling and Power Management for Chip Multiprocessors, International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2008
- VARIUS: A Model of Parameter Variation and Resulting Timing Errors for Microarchitects, IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing (IEEE TSM), February 2008
- Mitigating Parameter Variation with Dynamic Fine-Grain Body Biasing, International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), December 2007
Teaching
CSE6421 and CSE3421
Some history
I was born in Cluj-Napoca, in the beautiful province of Transilvania in Romania. I received an Engineer Diploma from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in 2002.