BEING SUCCESSFUL IN GRADUATE

SCHOOL
HOW TO BE A DRAGON

Samira Khan
 WHO AM I?
• Samira Khan
• Assistant Professor, UVa
• samirakhan@virginia.edu

• Visiting Faculty, Google Brain

• Worked at CMU, Intel, AMD, EPFL

• Research Interest
• Building end-to-end systems for emerging technologies
• Publication: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~smk9u/publication.html
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 RESEARCH GROUP: ShiftLab
The name is inspired by the term “Paradigm Shift”,
popularized by Thomas Kuhn

Our mission is to make fundamental change to computing 3

 Systems In The Future
Architects’ Bubble SPECIALIZED CORES
CP
U

BILLIONS OF EDGE DEVICES

Ld/St
MEMOR
Y

PERSISTENT MEM
DRAM MEMORY
WITH
FILE LOGIC
STORAG

I/O
E

SMART SSD

SMART NIC

Need to redesign focusing on data 4

 Systems In The Future
SPECIALIZED CORES
PROBLEM
Which functions
APPLICATION to offload?
What is the
PERSISTENT MEM Software OS interface?
MEMORY
WITH Who provides
LOGIC RUNTIME data consistency?
How to map and
SMART SSD ARCHITECTURE schedule data?
Hardware CIRCUITS How to enable
computation?
SMART NIC
BILLIONS OF EDGE DEVICES

Need a proper software stack for Data-Centric System 5

Focus on Building Artifacts, Tools, and Datasets

CPU
PMTest XFDetector PMFuzz
ASPLOS’19 ASPLOS’20 ASPLOS’21 MultiPIM
CAL’21
Real System Testing Tools Detailed Simulator

PMNet SoftMC SoftNDP Refresh Timing

ISCA’21 HPCA’17 Current SIGMETRICS’14
HPCA’15, SIGMETRICS’16

FPGA-Based Frameworks DRAM Datasets

What do I look for in a PhD Student?

I look for dragons to train!

THE SECRET TO MAKING AN
IMPACT

Don’t be a sheep.
You are a dragon. Be a dragon.
 HOW TO BE A DRAGON

• Courage

• Hard work

• Mentoring

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HOW TO BE A DRAGON: COURAGE
• Do not follow, find your own path

• Be bold, be courageous, have a vision for your work

• “Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important
problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not
going to.”

“Shoot for the moon and even if you miss

you will land among the stars!”
 HOW TO BE A DRAGON: HARD
WORK
• The more you know  the more you learn;
• The more you learn  the more you can do;
• The more you can do  the more the opportunity;

• Given two people with exactly the same ability

• If one person manages even one more hour day in and day out
• Will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime
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 TRAIN A DRAGON:
IMPORTANCE OF MENTORING
• Facilitate an environment where students lead

• Active group discussion and brainstorming

• Train students to avoid being a sound absorber

• Avoid people who merely say “Yes, yes, yes”
• Students need to learn to defend and push back

• Critical mass in action, stimulate students right back

• “Yes, that reminds me of so and so”
• “Have you thought about that or this?”
 More Advice from Richard Hamming
• Best known for Hamming Code
• Won Turing Award in 1968
• For his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems,
and error-detecting and error-correcting codes
• Was part of the Manhattan Project
• Worked in Bell Labs for 30 years

• You and Your Research

• Mainly his advice to other researchers
• http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~smk9u/Khan_how_to_do_resear
ch.pptx
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