
Zhiru Zhang
Associate 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 an Associate 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. Other major recognitions of his work include a Facebook Research Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, the DAC Under-40 Innovators Award, the Rising Professional Achievement Award from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, the IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award, an NSF CAREER Award, the Ross Freeman Award for Technical Innovation from Xilinx, three Best Paper Awards from FPGA (2022, 2021, 2019), 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 paper on SDC-based scheduling is inducted into the ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA Hall of Fame for the class of 2022. 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'22, '21, '18, '17, '16, '15, '14)
- ECE 5775 (now 6775) [site]: High-Level Digital Design Automation (Fall'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
- BMT accepted to NeurIPS'23 (9/21)
- Invited talk on ML for HLS "at" ESWeek (9/19)
- Invited panel on HLS adoption at DAC (7/13)
- Invited talk on datapath synthesis at DAC (7/11)
- CSTIC'23 Symposium IX keynote on binarized deep learning (6/27)
- Yixiao received Cornell ECE Outstanding PhD TA Award! (4/20)
- Invited panel on EDA for domain specific computing at ISPD (3/29)
- ASIP synthesis paper inducted into ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA Hall of Fame (2/13)
- Amazon Tech Talk on accelerator synthesis (12/12/22)
- GARNET accepted to LoG as spotlight paper (11/24/22)
- Elevated to IEEE Fellow [news] (11/21/22)
- Ecenur successfully defended her dissertation (10/12/22)
- Received Michael Tien ’72 Excellence in Teaching Award (9/22)
- Chenhui and Andrew received 2022 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (08/31/22)
- Debjit joins the faculty of UIC ECE (8/6/22)
- Invited talk on HeteroCL at DAC'22 (7/13/22)
- Organized the first hybrid FCCM conference at Cornell Tech (5/18/22)
- RapidStream covered by EE Journal (5/9/22)
- Invited talk on binary neural networks "at" NSF A3D3 Institute [slides] (5/2/22)
- Keynote paper on FPGA HLS published in ACM TRETS (4/22/22)
- Invited talk on near-memory sparse processing "at" DATE'22 (3/18/22)
- RapidStream received FPGA'22 Best paper Award (3/1/22)
- SDC scheduling paper inducted into ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA Hall of Fame (3/1/22)
- Dagger received IEEE Micro Top Picks 2022 Honorable Mention (1/10/22)
- Invited talk on efficient deep learning "at" Rutgers [video] (11/18/21)
- Sean successfully defended his dissertation (11/9/21)
- Invited talk on low-bitwidth neural nets "at" ICCAD Halo Workshop (11/4/21)
- MLCAD'21 plenary talk on ML for agile hardware design [video] (9/3/21)
- Circuit distillation nominated for DAC'21 best paper (7/27/21)
- Yuan successfully defended his dissertation (3/17/21)
- AutoBridge won FPGA'21 Best Paper Award (3/2/21)
- Academia lecture on agile hardware specialization "at" Qualcomm (1/29/21)
- FracBNN and AutoBridge selected as FPGA'21 best paper candidates (1/13/21)
- Group channel live on Youtube (12/4/20)
- 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)
- Chenhui Deng (MS/PhD, started FA'18)
- Shaojie Xiang (MS/PhD, started FA'18)
- Yichi Zhang (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)
- Dingyi Dai (MS, started FA'21)
- Matthew Hofmann (MS/PhD, started FA'22)
- Zhanqiu (Summer) Hu (MS/PhD, started FA'23, with Prof. Udit Gupta)
- Dr. Zhongyuan Zhao (PostDoc, 2020-)
- 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
- Yuwei Hu (MS, 2018-2021) now with Huawei, Beijing
- 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, Mountain View, CA
- 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