L Lakshmanan

Hi! I’m a PhD student at the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh as part of the MLSystems CDT studentship. I am part of the EASE lab, working under the guidance of Prof. Boris Grot and co-supervised by 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.

I’m a systems researcher. I have a particular interest in CPU microarchitecture, workload-aware architectural optimizations and hardware-aware software design (to a lesser extent). General purpose approaches to improve performance often fall short in the context of specialised large-scale workloads, and I believe that slightly tailored solutions are sometimes necessary to address the unique challenges that some workloads pose. Such a 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.

I work on analysing (here right now) and improving (in some time hopefully) the hardware performance for ML inference workloads on mobile devices. Specific ideas that I’m interested in include effective data prefetching, novel cache architectures and memory management techniques.

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.