I am a master’s student studying Computer Science at Georgia Tech. In my first two semester and my internships, I learned to hack computer systems. This is my last semester, and I’m taking “Ivory Tower” math-y courses. (for science, and for the children!).

I’m interested in working in systems, compilers, databases and HPC. I’m inclined towards projects that lie at the intersection of implementation and theory. From a theoretical standpoint, I’m interested in parallelism, concurrency, algorithms, and programming languages. At Georgia Tech, I’ve taken Compiler Optimizations, Advanced Operating Systems, Database System Implementation (internals), Datacenter Networks and Systems, and Machine Learning. In other words, I’ve hacked LLVM, KVM, buzzDB, and have read loads of systems research papers.

Experience

2023- Back to Georgia Tech

In Spring 2023, I’ll be returning as a teaching assistant for CS 6210. Besides that, I’m taking two math-y courses- Parallelizing Compilers and Graduate Algorithms, learning a bit of Microeconomics, and am enjoying the (most probably) last semester of my education.

2022- Georgia Tech, Nvidia, and Sambanova Systems

In Spring 2022, I worked as a teaching assistant for Prof Kishore Ramachandran’s course, CS 6210 Advanced Operating Systems.

I fulfilled my long-cherished dream of working in a chip company this year, twice.

In the summer, I interned at Nvidia, working in the Fleet Command team, where I wrote a new service for zero-touch provisioning of GPU-enabled edge devices. I also built a prototype where I integrated the Fleet Command log collection service with an internal ELK data platform, and researched a binary-diff mechanism for making over-the-air updates more efficient. The team is wonderful, filled with people having different areas of expertise, and with two common traits- everyone is really nice and helpful.

In the fall, I interned at Sambanova Systems in Palo Alto, working on the compiler for a Domain Specific Language (DSL) used for implementing PyTorch-style operators on their chip. The architecture is very different from whatever else is on the market. This was the place where I finally earned my compiler stripes. Other than that, I met a lot of people who were really smart, enthusiastic, and fun to be around.

2021- Veritas Technologies

As a final year undergrad at College of Engineering Pune, I did a co-op / internship at Veritas Technologies in the Infoscale team, working on a Kubernetes Container Storage Interface driver for Infoscale. Essentially, it is a microservice that implements this gRPC interface. Kubernetes will call this microservice for allocating volumes for containers that it schedules. This was an awesome experience, because it allowed me to work with Kubernetes Custom Resources, code-generation, and the CSI spec.

2020- IIT Kanpur

Before that, I did a research internship at IIT Kanpur in December 2019-20 and summer 2020 with Prof. Swarnendu Biswas, where I worked on sparse matrix format selection for Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication (one of the ways you can run PageRank) on GPUs and high performance processors. During the internship, I created a semi-supervised format selection model which only requires labelling of a 10% subset of the training set, with a view to inexpensively create models for different processor architectures and enhance portability. During the winter and in early summer I studied NVIDIA CUSP CUDA kernels for Sparse Matrix Vector multiplication, and created schemes for creating representative sparse matrix samples for format selection. Also proposed new statistical features for characterising sparse matrices with respect to these kernels. Our work resulted in a paper at ICPP 2021’s DUAC workshop. Have a look at it here.

2017 - 2021- COEP Satellite Team

I was the ADCS Subsystem Lead at COEP’s Satellite Initiative. The team is working on designing (and hopes to launch) a Solar Sailing satellite- one which maneuvers its orbit purely using solar radiation. My work involved designing and testing solar sail orientations for maximizing orbit rise. I built a continuous thrust propagator using the Python API of GMAT’s General Mission Analysis Tool, and validated it. I found some anomalous trends in the satellite’s orbit, in the simulations, and found an interesting explanation for these anomalies- the fact that the earth is not actually spherical. Before that I worked on adding modules to a C-based satellite orientation simulation in an ooold codebase. Other than that, I used to hang around in the lab being generally chatty and poking my nose in when when our onboard computer folks sat discussing BCH, stackless coroutines, and deadlocks. If you are a COEP student, consider joining the team the next time they conduct inductions! CSAT has got really cool stuff going on.

Misc

Besides this, the other things from undergrad that I loved doing were hacking xv6, building an AI chess game, whom I named “Trillian” (a Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference), and my brief tryst with the charms of Functional Programming and Scheme when I was young and carefree.

Life

This is a personal website, but it is also my blog- the posts are scattered and mostly not Deep CS posts, but hey! Other stuff is fun too! If you want to see my code, look at my github. If you like to read, have a gander at my goodreads.

Inspite of my respect for Emacs and Arch users, I opt to use Vim (sometimes VSCode) and Manjaro, and have grown to love the GUI package manager. I’m an open source fan. Recently, I started using Clang instead of GCC.

I hope to do things in life other than CS- I’ve at different points in time been really into trekking, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, classical music (western and Hindustani), Chess, and Badminton. I enjoy cooking, and am becoming better at it, one dish at a time. I’ve written some weird but entertaining articles for our college magazine, and served as editor for a year. I have a long-unfulfilled wish of running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign in a highly detailed steampunk world. I learned a bit of rowing (sculling) during my summer break after second year, but have a tendency to fall into the Mutha river from the stablest of boats. Now, I’m learning rock-climbing fencing.