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Aninda Manocha

Computer Science PhD Student

Princeton University

About

I am a second-year graduate student in Computer Science at Princeton University advised by Professor Margaret Martonosi. My broad area of research is Computer Architecture and I am a contributor to the DECADES project, a full-stack system design to improve the performance, power, programmability, and portability of several emerging workflows in the broad areas of Machine Learning and Graph Analytics. Additionally, this platform rapidly adapts to the increasingly flexible and blurred boundary between software and hardware through various reconfigurable hardware features, depending on application characteristics. Currently, I am exploring these ideas in the domain of graph and other sparse applications.

Previously, I worked with Professor Benjamin C. Lee at Duke University, where I received my bachelor’s degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as Computer Science. My research involved distributed systems, crowd computing and mobile architectures, and efficient hardware accelerator design with statistical learning for high-level synthesis parameter tuning.

I enjoy programming and have served as a software engineering intern at Lenovo, Cisco, and Adobe. I am also a 2017 Duke Technology Scholar.

Interests

  • Software-defined hardware and domain-specific architectures
  • Memory systems for graph/sparse applications
  • Heterogeneous parallelism

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2023

    Princeton University

  • BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, 2018

    Duke University

Projects

*
All Software Hardware

DECADES

A DARPA-funded project to create specialized, reconfigurable hardware to accelerate important applications.

Electric Keyboard

An electric keyboard constructed out of an FPGA, a monitor, and 13 sensing circuits and custom-made keys.

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Department of Computer Science at Princeton University

Aug 2018 – Present Princeton, New Jersey

Advisor: Dr. Margaret R. Martonosi

Designing full-stack approaches to optimize the performance, power, and programmability of graph and other sparse analytics that are the heart of many modern big data applications; contributing to the development of a specialized, reconfigurable hardware platform for accelerating different software applications as part of DARPA’s Software Defined Hardware (SDH) program.

 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University

Aug 2017 – Jun 2018 Durham, North Carolina

Advisor: Dr. Benjamin C. Lee

Designed a framework to perform Bayesian optimization to jointly optimize parameters for high-level synthesis (HLS) and quickly discover Pareto optimal design points; outperformed other optimization algorithms (simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, and random search) in terms of efficiency.

 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineering Intern

Adobe

May 2017 – Aug 2017 San Francisco, California
Designed an intelligent thumbnailing algorithm to identify the most representative frame of marketing videos uploaded for video processing in Scene7 and Adobe Experience Manager; significantly reduced existing server overhead and improved software reliability.
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University

Jan 2017 – May 2017 Durham, North Carolina

Advisor: Dr. Benjamin C. Lee

Evaluated a crowd computing framework designed for Android and brought it up to date with modern devices; deployed framework on different systems (emulator, phone, and tablet) using an OpenCV facial recognition application.

 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineering Intern

Cisco Systems

May 2016 – Aug 2016 San Jose, California
Developed a suite of over 75 verification scripts to automate the testing and monitoring of various network events, such as crash/traceback checks, hardware boots/failovers, configuration loss checks, and data collection; created a web application to dynamically display quality metrics progression of routing platforms.
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Department of Mathematics at Duke University

Aug 2014 – Jun 2015 Durham, North Carolina

Advisors: Dr. Lenhard Ng (Duke) and Dr. Daniel J. Teague (NCSSM)

Studied Knot Theory and focused on properties of Legendrian knots to classify other knots and extend an existing knot atlas; developed a Java program to identify isotopic Legendrian knots and enumerate transverse knots.

 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineering Intern

Lenovo

Jun 2014 – Jul 2014 Morrisville, North Carolina
Created various benchmarking scripts to be used as part of the System Integration Test (SIT) program that evaluated the quality and performance of various servers before they are released to the enterprise server market; analyzed and compared several aspects of server firmware and hardware.
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

Mar 2014 – Dec 2014 Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Advisor: Dr. Gregory M. Forest

Extended a computational and mathematical model of virus motion in the human respiratory system to explore gene therapy as a means of treating cystic fibrosis (CF).

Popular Topics

accelerators architecture assembly circuits compilers fpga hardware heterogeneous research simulators software verilog

Contact

  • Department of Computer Science
    Princeton University
    35 Olden Street
    Princeton, NJ 08540