Zhiru Zhang
Professor
Computer Systems Laboratory
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
College of Engineering
Cornell University
office: 320 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853
phone: (607) 255-5954
email: zhiruz -at- cornell.edu
Dr. Zhiru Zhang is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University and a member of the Computer Systems Laboratory. His current research investigates new algorithms, methodologies, and design automation tools for heterogeneous computing systems. Recent publications from his group focus on the topics of high-level synthesis (HLS), hardware specialization for machine learning, and programming models for software-defined FPGAs.
He is an IEEE Fellow and has been honored with the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, AWS AI Amazon Research Award, Facebook Research Award, Google Faculty Research Award, DAC Under-40 Innovators Award, Rising Professional Achievement Award from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, DARPA Young Faculty Award, IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, Ross Freeman Award for Technical Innovation from Xilinx, four Best Paper Awards from FPGA (2024, 2022, 2021, 2019), a Best Paper Award from AutoML (2024), Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security (2020), a Best Short Paper Award from FCCM (2018), a Best Paper Award from the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (2012), and multiple best paper nominations (DAC'21, FPGA'21,'18,'17, ICCAD'09). His papers on HLS scheduling and application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) compilation have been inducted into the ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA Hall of Fame for the classes of 2022 and 2023, respectively. On the teaching side, he received the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018) and twice the Michael Tien'72 Excellence in Teaching Award (2016, 2022), the highest recognition for teaching in the College of Engineering.
Prior to joining Cornell, he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and co-founded AutoESL based on his dissertation research on HLS. AutoESL was acquired by Xilinx (now AMD), and its HLS tool evolved into Vivado HLS (now Vitis HLS), which is widely used for designing FPGA-based hardware accelerators. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University and an M.S. in Computer Science from UCLA.
Teaching
- ENGRD/ECE 2300 [site]: Digital Logic and Computer Organization (Spring'24, '22, '21, '18, '17, '16, '15, '14)
- ECE 5775 (now 6775) [site]: High-Level Digital Design Automation (Fall'24, '23, '22, '18, '17, '16, '15, '14)
- ECE 6980: Special Topics on Hardware Acceleration of Deep Learning (Spring'23)
- ENGRG 1050: Freshman Engineering Seminar (Fall'22, '17, '13)
- ECE 5950: Special Topics on High-Level Digital Design Automation (Spring'13)
News
- SmoothE accepted to ASPLOS'25 (10/31)
- FLIQS won AutoML'24 Best Paper Award (9/12)
- Invited talk on data specialization for ML at MLCAD (9/9)
- Hongzheng won 3rd place in the PLDI'24 Student Research Competition (6/27)
- Invited talk on accelerator programming "at" IBM (6/14)
- GPU pangenome layout accepted to SC'24 (6/14)
- Hongzheng selected as 2024 MLCommons Rising Stars (5/16)
- Invited AI-day tech talk on binarized deep learning "at" RTX (5/8)
- Grateful to receive AWS AI Amazon Research Award (4/29)
- Grateful to receive Intel Outstanding Researcher Award (4/11)
- Sabre accepted to OSDI'24 (3/21)
- LLM FPGA accepted to FCCM'24 journal track (3/19)
- HLS formal verification won FPGA'24 Best Paper Award (3/5)
- Invited talk on graph learning at FPGA'24 SpatialML Workshop (3/3)
- Allo accepted to PLDI'24 (2/26)
- Chenhui successfully defended his dissertation (2/23)
- HOGA accepted to DAC'24 (2/13)
- Polynormer accepted to ICLR'24 (1/16)
- UniSparse accepted to OOPSLA'24 (12/22/2023)
- Slapo accepted to ASPLOS'24 (11/7/2023)
- Yichi successfully defended his dissertation (9/29/2023)
- BMT accepted to NeurIPS'23 (9/21/2023)
- Invited talk on ML for HLS "at" ESWeek (9/19/2023)
- Invited panel on HLS adoption at DAC (7/13/2023)
- Invited talk on datapath synthesis at DAC (7/11/2023)
- CSTIC'23 Symposium IX keynote on binarized deep learning (6/27/2023)
- Yixiao received Cornell ECE Outstanding PhD TA Award! (4/20/2023)
- Invited panel on EDA for domain specific computing at ISPD (3/29/2023)
- ASIP synthesis paper inducted into ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA Hall of Fame (2/13/2023)
- Amazon Tech Talk on accelerator synthesis (12/12/2022)
- GARNET accepted to LoG as spotlight paper (11/24/2022)
- Elevated to IEEE Fellow [news] (11/21/2022)
- Ecenur successfully defended her dissertation (10/12/2022)
- Grateful to to receive Michael Tien ’72 Excellence in Teaching Award (9/22/2022)
- Chenhui and Andrew received 2022 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (08/31/2022)
- More news
Services
- General Chair of 32nd International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA 2024)
- Program Chair of 31st International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA 2023)
- General Chair of 30th IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM 2022)
Research Group
[site] [github] [youtube] [linkedin]
- Hanchen Jin (MS/PhD, started SP'18)
- Shaojie Xiang (MS/PhD, started FA'18)
- Jordan Dotzel (MS/PhD, started FA'19, with Prof. Mohamed Abdelfattah)
- Nikita Lazarev (MS/PhD, started FA'19, with Prof. Christina Delimitrou)
- Jie Liu (MS/PhD, started FA'19)
- Zichao Yue (MS/PhD, started SU'20)
- Yixiao Du (MS/PhD, started SU'20)
- Yaohui Cai (MS/PhD, started SP'21, with Prof. Chris De Sa)
- Andrew Butt (MS/PhD, started FA'21)
- Hongzheng Chen (MS/PhD, started FA'21)
- Jiajie Li (MS/PhD, started FA'21)
- Niansong Zhang (MS/PhD, started FA'21)
- Matthew Hofmann (MS/PhD, started FA'22)
- Zhanqiu (Summer) Hu (MS/PhD, started FA'23, with Prof. Udit Gupta)
- Vesal Bakhtazad (MS/PhD, started SP'24)
- Dr. Grace Dinh (PostDoc, 2024-)
- Dr. Chenhui Deng (PhD, 2018-2024) now with NVIDIA Research, Santa Clara, CA
- Dr. Yichi Zhang (PhD, 2018-2023) now with Google Research, Mountain View, CA
- Dr. Zhongyuan Zhao (PostDoc, 2020-2023) now with Qualcomm, San Diego, CA
- Prof. Qi Sun (PostDoc, 2022-2023) now with Zhejiang University
- Dr. Ecenur Ustun (PhD, 2016-2022, dissertation) now with Meta Reality Labs, Redmond, WA
- Prof. Debjit Pal (PostDoc, 2019-2022) now with University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL
- Dr. Yi-Hsiang (Sean) Lai (PhD, 2016-2021, dissertation) now with AWS AI, Santa Clara, CA
- Dr. Yuan Zhou (PhD, 2015-2021, dissertation) now with AWS AI, Santa Clara, CA
- Dr. Nitish Srivastava (PhD, 2014-2020, dissertation) now with Google, New York City, NY
- Dr. Ritchie Zhao (PhD, 2014-2019, dissertation) now with Microsoft, Redmond, WA
- Prof. Cunxi Yu (PostDoc, 2018-2019) now with University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
- Dr. Zhenghong (John) Jiang (PostDoc, 2016-2019) now with Cadence, San Jose, CA
- Dr. Steve Dai (PhD, 2013-2018, dissertation) now with NVIDIA Research, Santa Clara, CA
- Dr. Gai Liu (PhD, 2013-2018, dissertation) now with TikTok, Mountain View, CA
- Dr. Mingxing Tan (PostDoc, 2013-2015) now with Waymo Research, Mountain View, CA