Curriculum Vitae - Mihai Budiu

At Microsoft Research I am working in the areas of computer security and distributed file systems.

My thesis research at Carnegie Mellon has spanned the areas of compilers, computer architecture, reconfigurable hardware, and high-level synthesis. My thesis explored a new model of computation: Spatial Computation. In this model of computation one no longer uses general-purpose processors (i.e. microprocessors) to execute programs. Instead, high-level language programs are directly compiled into circuits.

I have implemented two compilers for Spatial Computation: the PipeRench DIL compiler, and CASH, a Compiler for Application-Specific Hardware. The DIL compiler subsumed a complete CAD tool-flow, performing parsing, optimizations, place-and-route, technology mapping, while being 700 times faster than commercial CAD tools. The circuits generated by the CASH compiler feature high computational performance while consuming 1000 less energy compared to a generic microprocessor.

I was a member of the Phoenix and PipeRench projects.

Postdoc

Fall 2003-Summer 2004, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department, professor Seth Goldstein, Phoenix Project.

Graduate Student (Ph.D. program)

Fall 1997-Summer 2003, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department, Pittsburgh, PA. Thesis defended in December 2003.

Master of Science

December 2000, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department.

Graduate Student

Fall 1996-Spring 1997, enrolled in the Ph.D. program of the Computer Science Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Master of Science

Fall 1995-Spring 1996, ``Politehnica'' University of Bucharest, Romania; Department of Engineering Sciences.

Summer school

Summer 1993, International Summer Institute for Parallel Computer Architectures, Languages and Algorithms, Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Bachelor of Science

Fall 1990-Spring 1995, ``Politehnica'' University of Bucharest, Romania, major in Computer Science; Department of Engineering Sciences.

Military Service

Fall 1989-Spring 1990.

High-school diploma

(Baccalaureate) Fall 1989, Liceul de Informatica, Bucharest, Romania.

Monthly column (3000-8000 words)
NET Report Romanian Computer Magazine (name changed in 2001 from PC Report)
August 1996-February 2002.

Article	Printed
The C Compiler	August 1996
How to Write Programs	October 1996
The Unix Filesystem	November 1996
OS Kernels	December 1996
User-space Multithreading	January 1997
Caches	March 1997
The ``Back-Door''	April 1997
Who's Afraid of Emacs?	May 1997
The Unix Shell	June 1997
``Corect'': a spell-checker for Romanian	July 1997
New Trends in Algorithms Research	August 1997
Why Microkernels are Losing	September 1997
Efficient File Systems	October 1997
The Functioning of the Unix Filesystem	December 1997
The Anatomy of a System Call in Linux	January 1998
The Virtual Filesystem Switch	February 1998
Watchdogs: A Project in Operating Systems	March 1998
Atomic Transactions	April 1998
Routing in the Internet	May 1998
Open-Source Software	June 1998
Reconfigurable Hardware	July 1998
Kerberos	August 1998
System Measurements I: Tools	September 1998
System Measurements II: Measuring the OS	October 1998
Cache Coherence in SMP Systems	November 1998
CPU Pipelining	December 1998
Memory Allocation in OS Kernels	January 1999
LAN Bridges	February 1999
Internet Tunneling	April 1999
Scalability in Computer Networks (with Ion Stoica)	May 1999
DDD - a Visual Debugger	June 1999
Register Renaming	July 1999
Branch Prediction	August 1999
Boolean Satisfiability I: Theoretical Issues	October 1999
Boolean Satisfiability II: Practical Solutions	November 1999
Computational Complexity I: Computability	December 1999
Computational Complexity II: The Polynomial Hierarchy	February 2000
Cognitive Sciences (with Raluca Budiu)	March 2000
The Future of Microprocessors	March 2000
Regular Expressions	April 2000
Cooperation and Competition in the Internet	May 2000
Research in Robotics (with Cristi Dima)	June 2000
Computer Vision in Robotics (with Cristi Dima)	June 2000
An Interview with Brian Kernighan	August 2000
A Music Digital Library (with Cristi Francu)	September 2000
LaTeX: a document preparation system for mathematics	October 2000
The CMU Ballista project	November 2000
Shell programming	December 2000
Micro-electro-mechanical systems	January 2001
Non-Work-Conserving Scheduling Disciplines in Computer Networks	February 2001
An interview with Bruce Maggs (Akamai Technologies)	March 2001
Nanotechnology and the Future of Computing	May 2001
Spatial Computation	June 2001
DDoS Attacks in the Internet	July 2001
Speculative Execution	September 2001
The CodeRed Internet Worm	October 2001
Metacompilation	November 2001
Reliability in Computer Architecture: I Hardware	January 2002
Reliability in Computer Architecture: II Software	February 2002

Spatial Computation
Google Inc., May 10, 2005, Mountain View, CA.

Dataflow: A Complement to Superscalar
IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software ISPASS 05, March 21-22, 2005, Austin, TX.

Inter-Iteration Scalar Replacement in the Presence of Conditional Control-Flow
3rd Workshop on Optimizations for DSP and Embedded Systems ODES 05, March 20, 2005, San Jose, CA.

Spatial Computation
11th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 04, October 11, 2004, Boston, MA.

Spatial Computation
SDI seminar, July 8, 2004, CMU.

Spatial Computation — Computing without General-Purpose Processors
Invited talk

• Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, February 24, 2004.
• University of Pittsburgh CS, PA, March 31, 2004.
• Georgia Tech CS, Atlanta, GA, April 6-7, 2004.
• Purdue University CS, West Lafayette, IN, April 8-9, 2004.
• Columbia University CS, New York, April 14, 2004.
• Toyota Technical Institute CS, Chicago, April 26, 2004.
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign CS+ECE, April 27-29, 2004.
• University of Chicago CS, April 30, 2004.
• Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, CA, May 17-18.

Compiling C to Asynchronous Hardware
Tutorial at ASYNC 2004, April 19, 2004, Hersonissos, Crete, Grece.

On the energy efficiency of computation
CALCM Seminar, February 17, 2004, CMU.

Spatial Computation
Ph.D. Thesis Defense, December 8, 2003, CMU.
Slides with notes in pdf.

Spatial Computation
CACLM seminar, October 21, 2003, CMU.

Compiling for Application-Specific Hardware
STMicroelectronics, June 2003, San Diego, CA.

Optimizing Memory Accesses for Spatial Computation
1st International ACM/IEEE Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, CGO 03, March 2003, San Francisco, CA.

ASH: A Substrate for Scalable Architectures
CACLM seminar, March 19, 2002, CMU.

Compiling Application-Specific Hardware
12th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications FPL 02, September 4, 2002, Montpellier (La Grande-Motte), France.

Peer-to-peer Hardware-software Interfaces for Reconfigurable Fabrics
IEEE Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FCCM 02, Napa Valley, CA, April 24 2002.

Application-Specific Hardware: Computing Without CPUs
Fourth CMU Symposium on Computer Systems, SOCS-4, October 2001, CMU.

General-Purpose Computation without General-Purpose Processors
Thesis proposal, July 2001, CMU.

NanoFabrics: Spatial Computing using Molecular Electronics
SSS Seminar, April 20, 2001, CMU.

BitValue Inference: Detecting and Exploiting Narrow Bitwidth Computations
6th International Euro-par 00 Conference
Munich, Germany, August 2000.

Detecting and Exploiting Narrow Bitwidth Computations
Second CMU Symposium on Computer Systems, SOCS-2, Sept 1999, CMU.

The CMU Reconfigurable Computing Project
SSS Seminar, Sept 1999, CMU.

The CMU Reconfigurable Computing Project
August 1999, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies.

Fast Compilation for Pipelined Reconfigurable Fabrics
Seventh ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGA 99, Monterey, CA, Feb 23, 1999.

Fast Compilation for Pipelined Reconfigurable Fabrics
SDI Seminar, December 1998, CMU.

PicOs: A Microkernel Operating System
Second Romanian Open Systems Event, ROSE 95, Bucharest, Romania, Nov 2 1995.

TA, Spring 2000

(Teaching Assistant) Carnegie Mellon University, for 15-453 ``Formal Languages, Automata and Computation'' (senior level). Professor: Frank Pfenning. My (powerpoint) lecture on "Turing Machines and the Real World".

TA, Spring 1999

Carnegie Mellon University, for 15-451 ``Algorithms'' (senior level). Professor: Avrim Blum.

TA, Spring 1997

Cornell University, for CS514 ``Distributed Operating Systems'' (master level). Professor: Kenneth Birman.

TA, Fall 1996

Cornell University, for CS414 ``Operating Systems'' and CS415 ``Practicum in Operating Systems'' (senior level). Professor: Kenneth Birman.

TA, Spring 1996

``Politehnica'' University, Bucharest, for ``Computer Networks'' (senior level).

TA, Fall 1995

``Politehnica'' University, for ``Compiler Design'' (senior level). Professor: Irina Athanasiu.

Teacher, 1992-1995

``Informatics'' High School, Bucharest; taught the classes ``Programming Languages'', ``Data Structures'' and ``Algorithms''. Responsible for all aspects of the course: curriculum, lesson plan, test administration, grading, projects.

Teacher, 1989

``Informatics'' High School, Bucharest; taught the freshman class ``BASIC HC 85''. Responsible for devising the curriculum and delivering all lectures.

Instructor, 1987-1988

``Informatics'' High School, Bucharest; ran seminars on computer programming for high school students.

Researcher

Fall 2004-current, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley.

Postdoc

Fall 2003-Summer 2004, Carnegie Mellon University, prof. Seth Copen Goldstein, member of the Phoenix project.

Research assistant

Fall 1997-Summer 2003, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Dept., prof. Seth Copen Goldstein. I worked in compilation for reconfigurable hardware devices. I have developed a custom hardware description language called DIL and a CAD tool which optimizes, places and routes DIL programs on the PipeRench reconfigurable hardware chip. I have designed and built a framework for cycle-accurate simulation of systems comprising processors and reconfigurable hardware using the SimpleScalar tool set. I have developed the CASH optimizing compiler which translates ANSI C programs to energy-efficient asynchronous hardware circuits.

Research intern, Summer 2000

Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ. Supervisor: Nevin Heintze. I studied compilation issues for a custom massively parallel DSP chip.

Research intern, Summer 1999

Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ. Supervisor: Nevin Heintze. I studied the use of reconfigurable hardware devices for the acceleration of Digital Signal Processing applications.

Research assistant

Summer 1997, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Dept., prof. Garth Gibson. During this summer I worked for the Parallel Data Lab, developing a multithreaded filesystem cache based on variable-size extents. This project was used by the Network Attached Secure Disks project.

Assistant editor

January 1998-February 2002, the Romanian Computer Magazine NET Report (old name PC Report), www.pcreport.ro.

Columnist

August 1996-February 2002 (monthly feature) in the Romanian Computer Magazine NET Report (old name PC Report) since August 1996.

Network administrator

1995; ``Politehnica'' University of Bucharest Communication Center, central hub of the Romanian Education Network, RoEduNet www.roedu.net.

Computer Programmer

1994; VAL Informatique, Bucharest, Romania (databases).

Unix System Administrator

1993; ``Politehnica'' University of Bucharest, Digital Signal Processing Laboratory.

Reviewer

for ICCAD 2001, 2003, ISCA 2002-2005, DAC 2004, ST Journal for Systems Research 2003, IEEE Transactions on Computers 2004, NSF CAREER 2004, ASP-DAC 2005, SAC 2005, RTAS 2005, ISVLSI 2005, COMPSAC 2005, TDSC 2005, PACT 2005, IJE 2005, ICCAD 2005.

Program committee member

International Workshop on Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC 2005), Algarve, Portugal, February 22, 2005.

Program chair

for SOCS-4, the Fourth CMU Symposium on Computer Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, October 6, 2001

Program committee member, publications chair and session chair

for SOCS-3: the Third CMU Symposium on Computer Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, October 14 2000.

Organizer

of the CMU SCS Student Seminar Series: Fall 1999-Fall 2002.

Creator and maintainer

of the ``Who's who in compilers and architecture'' web page, with over 1000 researchers, photos, urls and research summaries.

Author

of the first Romanian ispell dictionaries and configuration files www.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/ftp/rom-spell.taz. Apparently it is the basis of the Romanian dictionaries used by aspell and OpenOffice.