About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. My research focuses on the overlap between Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, and Operating Systems.

I'm looking for students! Send me an email if you think we have mutual interests. I'm also interested in externally advising students working on open-source hardware projects.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science
Princeton University, NJ
Adviser: Prof. David Wentzlaff

M.A., Computer Science
Princeton University, NJ
Adviser: Prof. David Wentzlaff

M.Sci., Computing Science, with Honours of the First Class
University of Glasgow, Scotland
Masters Advisor: Dr. John O'Donnell
Honours Advisor: Prof. Joseph Sventek

Exchange Student, Department of Computer Science
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA

Experience

ArchLab, University of California, Santa Barbara
Assistant Professor

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Research Assistant, Princeton Parallel Research Group

Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK (Summer 2016)
Research Intern

Arm Ltd, Cambridge, UK (Summer 2012)
Summer Placement (Intern)

University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland (Summer 2012)
Vacation Scholar (Research Intern)
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Sventek

Samsung Electronics, Suwon, Republic of Korea (Summer 2011)
Assistant Engineer (Intern)

Distributed Systems Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara (Summer 2010)
Research Assistant (Intern)
Advisor: Prof. Amr El Abbadi

Publications

Refereed Conference Publications

Journal and Magazine Articles

  • OpenPiton4HPC: Optimizing OpenPiton Towards High Performance Manycores
    N. Leyva, A. Monemi, N. Oliete-Escuín, G. López-Paradís, X. Abancens, J. Balkind, E. Vallejo, M. Moretó, L. Alvarez
    IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS), September 2024
  • CIFER: A Cache-Coherent 12nm 16mm2 SoC with Four 64-Bit RISC-V Application Cores, 18 32-Bit RISC-V Compute Cores, and a 1541 LUT6/mm2 Synthesizable eFPGA
    A. Li, T.-J. Chang, F. Gao, T. Ta, G Tziantzioulis, Y. Ou, M. Wang, J. Tu, K. Xu, P. Jackson, A. Ning, G. Chirkov, M. Orenes-Vera, S. Agwa, X. Yan, E. Tang, J. Balkind, C. Batten, D. Wentzlaff
    IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters (SSCL), August 2023
  • OPDB: A Scalable and Modular Design Benchmark
    G. Tziantzioulis, T.-J. Chang, J. Balkind, J. Tu, F. Gao, D. Wentzlaff
    IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), July 2021
  • OpenPiton at 5: A Nexus For Open And Agile Hardware Design
    J. Balkind, T.-J. Chang, P.J. Jackson, G. Tziantzioulis, A. Li, F. Gao, A. Lavrov, G. Chirkov, J. Tu, M. Shahrad, D. Wentzlaff
    IEEE Micro, July/August 2020
  • OpenPiton: An Open Source Hardware Platform For Your Research
    J. Balkind, M. McKeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, Y. Zhou, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, A. Fuchs, S. Payne, X. Liang, M. Matl, D. Wentzlaff
    Research Highlight - Communications of the ACM (CACM), December 2019
  • Piton: A Manycore Processor for Multi-Tenant Clouds
    M. McKeown, Y. Fu, T. Nguyen, Y. Zhou, J. Balkind, A. Lavrov, M. Shahrad, S. Payne, and D. Wentzlaff
    IEEE Micro, March/April 2017

Refereed Workshop Publications

Talks and Tutorials

Honours and Awards

  • Early CAREER Award - National Science Foundation, 2023
  • Open Hardware Trailblazer Fellowship - Open Source Hardware Association, 2022
  • First Prize Winner - Graduate Category - ACM Student Research Competition, ASPLOS 2019 - April 2019
  • Siebel Scholarship Class of 2018 - Siebel Scholars Foundation - September 2017
  • Gordon Y.S. Wu Fellowship in Engineering - Princeton University - September 2013 - June 2017
  • Fan Favourite Research Talk - Princeton Research Day - May 2016
  • Mentor Award - Princeton Graduate Student Appreciation Week - April 2016
  • 25 Under 25 Award - Princeton Innovation, Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering - February 2016
  • LabMatch/ReMatch Mentor Award - Princeton University - July 2015
  • Contribution to the School Award - University of Glasgow - June 2013
  • ARM Sponsorship - ARM Ltd - November 2012
  • Amor Class Prize - University of Glasgow - June 2012