Biography
Mohammad Alian serves as an Assistant Professor in the ECE Department at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from UIUC (2020) and UW-Madison (2015), respectively. His research team is focused on redefining the data-delivery hierarchy of future data centers. Mohammad's research has garnered recognition, including best paper nominations at HPCA 2017 and MICRO 2018, an IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention in 2017, an NSF CAREER award, and induction into the MICRO Hall of Fame in 2025. He serves as a co-lead Principal Investigator for the SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, with the primary objective of revolutionizing distributed computing for the next decade.
I am always looking for motivated students. You can send me an email if you are interested in joining my research group.
News
- 04/27/2026 Derrick has been selected as one of the 2026 ML and Systems Rising Stars! Congrats to Derrick!
- 04/27/2026 Kian won the Smith fellowship from Cornell College of Engineering! Congrats to Kian!
- 04/13/2026 Kian won the NSF GRFP fellowship! Congrats to Kian!
- 02/02/2026 Neel has been named as an Honorable Mention for the 2026 Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship! Congrats to Neel!
- 01/01/2026 Invited as a keynote speaker for UIUC's CSL Student Conference 2026!
- 12/19/2025 Derrick and Ezgi's abstract for Qualcomm's Innovation Fellowship has been selected for the full proposal round! Congrats to Derrick and Ezgi!
- 10/22/2025 Multi-Stage Data-Centric Dense Retrieval accepted to IEEE MICRO special issue on data-centric computing! Congrats to Derrick and the team!
- 10/18/2025 Zuoming Fu presented gem5 co-pilot at the CAMS workshop, in conjunction with MICRO 2025!
- 10/18/2025 Delivered the keynote talk at the Re-LAMP workshop, in conjunction with MICRO 2025!
- 07/15/2025 Inducted into the MICRO Hall of Fame!
More
- 07/15/2025 LongSight, an algorithmic-hardware co-design approach for enabling long context LLMs accepted to MICRO! Congrats to Derrick and the team!
- 06/15/2025 RACER, a framework to avoid end-to-end slowdowns in CPUs with on-chip accelerators accepted to ACM TACO! Congrats to Neel!
- 05/19/2025 Compute-Enabled CXL Memory Expansion for Efficient Retrieval Augmented Generation accepted to IEEE MICRO! Congrats to Derrick and Neel!
- 04/25/2025 XRT, an accelerator-aware runtime for accelerated chip multiprocessors accepted to USENIX ATC! Congrats to Neel!
- 03/23/2025 DReX, accurate and scalable dense retrieval acceleration accepted to ISCA! Congrats to Derrick!
- 03/10/2025 Invited to present our research on retrieval systems acceleration to Samsung and SK-Hynix as part of SRC's Asia tour!
- 03/05/2025 Simultaneous Data-Delivery Threads accepted to CAL!
- 03/03/2025 Circuit-level DRAM datapath model accepted to ISPASS as a poster!
- 10/02/2024 Accelerating Retrieval Augmented Generation accepted to ASPLOS-2025! Congrats to Derrick, Mohammad, and Neel!
- 09/01/2024 Invited to talk at 1st International Workshop on Sustainable AI at ETH Zurich!
- 07/31/2024 Per-Bank Bandwidth Regulation of Shared Last-Level Cache for Real-Time Systems accepted to RTSS!
- 07/01/2024 Moved to Cornell ECE!
- 04/02/2024 Silicon Efficiency in Post-Moore Servers accepted to HotEthics!
- 03/31/2024 Userspace networking in gem5 accepted to ISPASS! Congrats to Johnson! Here is the github repo for the extensions.
- 02/28/2024 Presented our work on accelerating Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to Micron!
- 11/07/2023 DSCS-Serverless got accepted to ASPLOS 2024!
- 10/22/2023 SmartDIMM and DMX papers got accepted to HPCA 2024! Congrats to Neel and Amin!
- 09/16/2023 XFM received all the artifact evaluation ACM badges from MICRO 2023!
- 09/15/2023 Our project to enhance gem5 simulator ecosystem is selected for funding by NSF! This is a $3.5M collaborative project led by Jason Lowe-Power at UC-Davis!
- 07/24/2023 XFM accepted to MICRO 2023!
- 07/20/2023 Serving on HPCA 2024 PC!
- 07/10/2023 Our AI-Assisted Just-in-Time Scaffolding Framework for Exploring Modern Computer Design is selected for funding by NSF!
- 07/01/2023 Serving as the Broadening Participation Champion for ACE center!
- 06/26/2023 Giving a talk on intelligent data steering for Tbps networks at the MPSoC Forum!
- 06/17/2023 Giving a talk on sustainability of architectural simulation in the gem5 workshop in conjunction w/ ISCA!
- 05/12/2023 Received the Miller Faculty Scholar Award from KU School of Engineering!
- 04/12/2022 Serving on MICRO 2023 PC!
- 03/29/2023 Received $5k cloud access credit under the NSF CloudBank award for our research!
- 03/22/2023 Received an NSF CAREER award for research on near-memory datacenter network!
- 02/28/2023 gem5 profiling accepted to ISPASS 2023!
- 02/24/2023 Neel and Johnson presenting their research in YArch and FireSim workshops held in conjunction w/ ASPLOS!
- 02/12/2023 I am visiting EPFL PARSA Lab for one semester!
- 01/27/2023 Check out our latest addition to gem5! DPDK on gem5 is open source!
- 01/05/2023 Official announcement of the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, funded by a $31.5 million grant from JUMP 2.0!
- 09/21/2022 Serving as travel grant chair on ISPASS 2023!
- 09/07/2022 Serving on ISCA 2023 ERC!
- 09/01/2022 Johnson is presenting a poster at the ACM Student Research Competition at MICRO!
- 08/30/2022 Our team got second place in the Open Innovation Contest for AXDIMM Technology!
- 07/19/2022 IDIO got accepted to MICRO 2022!
- 07/15/2022 Presenting our recent research at Intel Labs!
- 07/08/2022 "CCRI: Planning-C: Accelerated Infrastructure for Simulating Future Systems" is selected for funding by NSF!
- 06/03/2022 Neel Patel received SFS scholarship. Congrats Neel!
- 03/10/2022 Two BlueField2 DPUs donated by NVIDIA!
- 12/15/2021 Our proposal was selected as one of the finalists in the Open Innovation Contest for AXDIMM Technology!
- 08/01/2021 Samsung Grant!
Research
My research interests lie at the intersection of computer architecture and systems, with a focus on redefining the data-delivery hierarchy—memory, storage, and network—of future datacenters. Computation in these datacenters will be distributed over a heterogeneous array of processing elements, packaged modularly within a server's boundaries, making inter- and intra-server data movement the key performance bottleneck. Rather than following the conventional view, in which data delivery revolves around compute, my research treats compute as a paradigm that revolves around the data-delivery hierarchy. To this end, my group seamlessly integrates processor, memory, and network architecture through a co-design with system software to minimize data movement and accelerate large-scale services.
Publications
2026
- Harry Ji, Ezgi Yücel, Nicole Li, P. Ramakrishna, Derrick Quinn, Jungmin Choi, Hoshik Kim, Mohammad Alian, José Martínez "C3: Collaborative CPU-Commodity DRAM Computation for Reliable LLM Acceleration," MICRO 2026 [paper]
- Shanqing Lin, Yuanlong Li, Mohammad Alian, Babak Falsafi, Konrad K. Lai "Accurate & Scalable Time-Based Sampling of Full-System Simulation," MICRO 2026 [paper]
2025
- Derrick Quinn, Ezgi Yücel, José Martínez, Mohammad Alian, "Multi-Stage Data-Centric Dense Retrieval," IEEE MICRO 2025 [paper]
- Zuoming Fu, Alex Manley, Mohammad Alian, "gem5 Co-Pilot: AI Assistant Agent for Architectural Design Space Acceleration," CAMS 2025 [paper]
- Derrick Quinn, Ezgi Yücel, Jinkwon Kim, José Martínez, Mohammad Alian, "LongSight: Compute-Enabled Memory to Accelerate Large-Context LLMs via Sparse Attention," MICRO 2025 [paper]
- Neel Patel, Ren Wang, Mohammad Alian, "RACER: Avoiding End-to-End Slowdowns in Accelerated Chip Multi-Processors," ACM TACO 2025 [paper]
- Derrick Quinn, Neel Patel, Mohammad Alian, "Compute-Enabled CXL Memory Expansion for Efficient Retrieval Augmented Generation," IEEE MICRO 2025 [paper]
- S M Mojahidul Ahsan, Mohammad Nouri, Ramesh Reddy Ganapam, Mohammad Alian and Tamzidul Hoque, "A Reconfigurable and Accurate Circuit-Level Substrate for DRAM Design and Analysis," GLSVLSI 2025 [paper]
- Neel Patel, Mohammad Alian, "XRT: An Accelerator-Aware Runtime for Accelerated Chip Multiprocessors," USENIX ATC 2025 [paper]
- Derrick Quinn, Ezgi Yücel, Martin Prammer, Zhenxing Fan, Kevin Skadron, Jignesh Patel, José Martínez, Mohammad Alian, "DReX: Accurate and Scalable Dense Retrieval Acceleration via Algorithmic-Hardware Codesign," ISCA 2025 [paper]
- Amin Mamandipoor, Huy Tran, and Mohammad Alian, "SDT: Cutting Datacenter Tax Through Simultaneous Data-Delivery Threads," CAL 2025 [paper]
- Ahsan Mojahidul, Mohammad Nouri, Ramesh Reddy Ganapam, Mohammad Alian, and Tamzidul Hoque "A Flexible and Accurate Circuit-Level Substrate for Future DRAM Design and Analysis," ISPASS 2025 [poster]
- Derrick Quinn, Mohammad Nouri, Neel Patel, Alireza Salimi, Sukhan Lee, Hamed Zamani, and Mohammad Alian, "Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Generation," ASPLOS 2025 [paper]
More
2024
- Connor Sullivan, Alex Manley, Mohammad Alian, Heechul Yun, "Per-Bank Bandwidth Regulation of Shared Last-Level Cache for Real-Time Systems," RTSS 2024 [paper]
- Johnson Umeike, Siddharth Agarwal, Nikita Lazarev, Mohammad Alian, "Userspace Networking in gem5," ISPASS 2024 [paper][ open source][slides]
- Rohan Mahapatra, Soroush Ghodrati, Byung Hoon Ahn, Sean Kinzer, Shu-Ting Wang, Hanyang Xu, Lavanya Karthikeyan, Hardik Sharma, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Mohammad Alian, and Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, "Domain-Specific Computational Storage for Serverless Computing," ASPLOS 2024 [paper]
- Neel Patel, Amin Mamandipoor, Mohammad Nouri, and Mohammad Alian, "SmartDIMM: In-Memory Acceleration of Upper Layer I/O Protocols," HPCA 2024 [paper]
- Shu-Ting Wang, Hanyang Xu, Amin Mamandipoor, Rohan Mahapatra, Byung Hoon Ahn, Soroush Ghodrati, Krishnan Kailas, Mohammad Alian, Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, "Data Motion Acceleration: Chaining Cross-Domain Multi Accelerators," HPCA 2024 [paper]
2023
- Neel Patel, Amin Mamandipoor, Derrick Quinn, and Mohammad Alian, "XFM: Accelerated Software-Defined Far Memory," MICRO 2023 [paper]
- Johnson Umeike, Neel Patel, Alex Manley, Amin Mamandipoor, Heechul Yun, Mohammad Alian, "Profiling gem5 Simulator," ISPASS 2023 [paper]
2022 and Older
- Mohammad Alian, Siddharth Agarwal, Jongmin Shin, Neel Patel, Yifan Yuan, Daehoon Kim, Ren Wang, Nam Sung Kim, "IDIO: Network-driven, inbound network data orchestration on server processors," MICRO 2022 [paper][slides]
- Ki-Dong Kang, Gyeongseo Park, Hyosang Kim, Mohammad Alian, Nam Sung Kim, and Daehoon Kim, "NMAP: Power Management Based on Network Packet Processing Mode Transition for Latency-Critical Workloads," MICRO 2021 [paper]
- Yifan Yuan, Mohammad Alian, Yipeng Wang, Ilia Kurakin, Ren Wang, Charlie Tai, Nam Sung Kim, "Don't Forget the I/O When Allocating Your LLC," ISCA 2021 [paper][slides]
- Mohammad Alian, Jongmin Shin, Ki-Dong Kang, Ren Wang, Alexandros Daglis, Daehoon Kim, Nam Sung Kim, "IDIO: Orchestrating Inbound Network Data on Server Processors," IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL) 2020 [paper]
- Soroush Ghodrati, Byung Hoon Ahn, Joon Kyung Kim, Sean Kinzer, Brahmendra Yatham, Navateja Alla, Hardik Sharma, Mohammad Alian, Eiman Ebrahimi, Nam Sung Kim, Cliff Young, Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, "Planaria: Dynamic architecture fission for spatial multi-tenant acceleration of deep neural networks," MICRO 2020 [paper][slides]
- Jason Lowe-Power, Abdul Mutaal Ahmad, Ayaz Akram, Mohammad Alian, et al. "The gem5 simulator: Version 20.0+," arXiv preprint 2020 [paper]
- Mohammad Alian, Yifan Yuan, Jie Zhang, Ren Wang, Myoungsoo Jung, and Nam Sung Kim, "Data direct I/O characterization for future I/O system exploration," ISPASS 2020 [paper][slides]
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Mohammad Alian, and Nam Sung Kim, "NetDIMM: Low-latency, near-memory network interface architecture," MICRO 2019 [paper][slides]
- Mohammad Alian, Seung Won Min, Hadi Asgharimoghaddam, Ashutosh Dhar, Dong Kai Wang, Thomas Roewer, Adam McPadden, Oliver O'Halloran, Deming Chen, Jinjun Xiong, Daehoon Kim, Wen-mei Hwu, and Nam Sung Kim, "Application-transparent near-memory processing architecture with memory channel network," MICRO 2018 [industry product] [paper][slides]
- Youjie Li, Jongse Park, Mohammad Alian, Yifan Yuan, Zheng Qu, Peitian Pan, Ren Wang, Alexander Gerhard Schwing, Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, and Nam Sung Kim, "A network-centric hardware/algorithm co-design to accelerate distributed training of deep neural networks," MICRO 2018 [paper][slides]
- Mohammad Alian, Krishna Parasuram Srinivasan, and Nam Sung Kim, "Simulating PCI-Express interconnect for future system exploration," IISWC 2018 [paper][slides]
- Mohammad Alian, Gabor Dozsa, Umur Darbaz, Stephan Diestelhorst, Daehoon Kim, and Nam Sung Kim, "dist-gem5: Distributed simulation of computer clusters," ISPASS 2017 [open source] [paper][slides]
- Mohammad Alian, Ahmed Abulila, Lokesh Jindal, Daehoon Kim, and Nam Sung Kim, "NCAP: Network-driven, packet context-aware power management for client-server architecture," HPCA 2017 [paper][slides]
Students
Current Members
Past Members
| Alex Manley |
|
MS. Graduate (KU) |
|
2025 |
|
First Employment: NVIDIA |
| Johnson Umeike |
|
MS. Graduate (KU) |
|
2024 |
|
First Employment: Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland |
Research Sponsors
- National Science Foundation
- Semiconductor Research Corporation
- Samsung Electronics
- NVIDIA (Equipment Donation)
- Ampere Computing (Equipment Donation)
Professional Activities
Program Committee
Organizing Committee
