CSE alum Akshitha Sriraman’s dissertation receives second ACM SIG recognition

CSE alum Akshitha Sriraman has been awarded a 2022 Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) for her dissertation, “Enabling Hyperscale Web Services.” This is the second major ACM SIG recognition her dissertation has received, along with the Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention awarded by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) and the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA).

Her dissertation was also previously recognized with the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award and the David J. Kuck Dissertation Prize.

Sriraman’s dissertation explores how to bridge computer architecture and software systems to tackle new challenges posed by massive web services, such as social media, online messaging, web search, video streaming, online healthcare, and online banking. These services serve billions of users and require data centers that scale to hundreds of thousands of servers. Services and data centers of this size are often called hyperscale.

In her dissertation, Sriraman presented technologies to enable these growing services to handle the massive user load while still offering good performance, cost, and energy efficiency. She tackled two key challenges facing hyperscale web services – the rapid, sudden growth of data and user base, and the decline in hardware performance scaling.
Sriraman is now an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. There, she has expanded her work to bridge computer architecture and software systems to enable efficient, sustainable, and equitable web systems. . She was advised by Prof. Thomas F. Wenisch.