Siddharth Sahay

Hi! I'm a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professor James Hoe. My research interests include computer architecture, type systems, compilers, and programming languages. Basically, I like writing code that understands other code! A detailed CV can be found here.

Current Work

I'm a member of the Intel/VMware Crossroads Academic Research Center, which conducts research on placing a (re)programmable data nexus, the Crossroads "FPGA", at the heart of datacenter servers. This data nexus then operates over data on the move between network, traditional compute, and storage elements. I contribute to two research vectors (RVs):

• RV 3 (Architecture) where I'm making an executable architecture template for the Crossroads device that can drive a variety of tools including simulators and performance models
• RV 5 (Dynamic Execution) where I'm working on ways to describe and compose FPGA applications more intelligently in the context of partial reconfiguration.

As an extension to my work on RV5, I'm also investigating local session types as a way to describe latency-insensitive hardware designs.

Teaching

In Fall 2021, I was a TA for CMU 18-740 (Modern Computer Architecture and Design), taught by Professor John Shen. Apart from regular TA work of grading and recitations, I created a new lab for the course exploring mobile GPUs and their programming, and created content on visualizing superscalar out-of-order execution and a taxonomy of computing devices based on compute-control tradeoffs. I'll be TA-ing this course again in Fall 2022!

Other Interests

I'm an avid gamer and I have way too many gaming systems (PC, console(s), VR, retro...) to be entirely comfortable about my health. I'm also an enthusiastic (if unskilled) tabletop RPG player and I'm usually the Forever DM, so I end up running quite a few campaigns, mostly made up on-the-fly and with truly horrendous voice acting. I also play electric guitar, bass guitar, and synths and love vibing out to dark ambient music. I also enjoy reading books, watching movies, and writing short stories, especially sci-fi and fantasy, and will happily talk for hours about Isaac Asimov's more obscure works. I also like baking. I also hate that I inadvertently end up using repetitive structures in my writing and need to patch it up with wannabe clever meta-references.

I was driven by my interest in games and animation to take a haitus from engineering after undergrad to explore turning my interest into a career. I did a course on animation from MAAC India and did some freelance (emphasis on free) work in rendering and short film production, but eventually decided that it was more suited to a hobby. Therefore, in my free time I'm working on an open source game. I'm more than happy to talk about games and animation and nerd out about extremely obscure and specific things in animated and/or interactive media! (weapon weight body mechanics in NieR: Automata, anyone?)

tl;dr

What society thinks I do	What my advisor thinks I do
What I think I do	What I actually do

(James, if you're reading this: this is a joke. I don't work on von Neumann architectures.)