L Lakshmanan

Hi! I’m an incoming PhD student at the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh as part of the MLSystems CDT studentship. I will be joining the EASE lab under the guidance of Prof. Boris Grot and Prof. Luo Mai. Previously, I did my Undergrad + Masters at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, where I worked on embedded systems for a variety of usecases with Prof. Aftab Hussain and Prof. Suresh Purini.

My research interests are in the domain of computer architecture and systems. I have a particular interest in memory systems, application-specific architectural optimizations and hardware-aware software design. General purpose approaches to improve efficiency and performance often fall short in the context of specialised large-scale workloads, and I believe that tailored solutions are necessary to address the unique challenges that a workload poses. A tailored solution is worth the effort too, due to the scale at which such applications are usually deployed. One prevalent example of such workloads is ML, which also happens to be a key focus area for my research.

Specific ideas that I’m interested in include effective data prefetching, novel cache architectures and memory management techniques towards the goal of improving performance and efficiency in specific workloads (at the very least).

In my free time, I enjoy listening to music, watching movies and anime/reading manga, and playing Pokemon or Chess (specifically those two). As for sports, I play (and follow) tennis, basketball and badminton (to some extent), and I follow F1. I also especially love travelling and wandering around new places.