ECE Professor Prashant Nair Recipient of TCCA Award

July 30, 2024

Assistant Professor Prashant Nair, from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Young Computer Architect Award. Professor Nair received this award “In recognition of outstanding contributions to mitigate scaling-related DRAM faults and security vulnerabilities.”

The TCCA annually honours early-career researchers with the TCCA Young Architect Award. This award is considered the highest honour for early-career researchers in the field of computer architecture across the world, recognizing outstanding research contributions. The award was presented at the banquet ceremony during the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 2024. UBC is the first Canadian University with a faculty member to receive the TCCA Young Architect award.

Professor Nair’s primary roles include teaching and research, with some time dedicated to service. He primarily teaches computer engineering courses, specifically Digital Design and undergraduate and graduate Computer Architecture. His research focuses on secure, reliable, and scalable memory systems. In addition, Professor Nair works on alternative computing paradigms, such as quantum computing, from a computer engineering perspective.

What were some of your recent works that contributed to you being selected for the TCCA Young Computer Architect Award? 

The efforts of my research group, Systems and Architectures STAR Lab, to mitigate the Rowhammer vulnerability in Dynamic Random Access Memories (DRAM) were a significant factor. Rowhammer is a security vulnerability that enables adversarial users to manipulate the data of other users who share the same memory system. Rowhammer enables adversarial users to repeatedly access their data in memory systems and indirectly tamper the data of other users (victims) in the shared memory system.

Additionally, my decade-long efforts in mitigating resilience issues with DRAM, which have had a notable industry impact, likely contributed to my selection for this award.

How do you feel about this award?

I am honoured to have been chosen for this award. To put things in perspective, UBC is the first Canadian University, and the first university outside of the United States to have its faculty receive this recognition. I am glad that the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been incredibly supportive of my research vision and growth.

“The award reinforces my motivation to continue doing good work and to expand my research mandate. I am also delighted that my community recognizes and supports the importance of simple, creative, and industry-friendly solutions.”

What impact could this research have?

My research in the area of DRAM scaling could significantly impact the development and enablement of applications in edge devices, client devices, and servers. It can also influence the design of current and future computing systems. This is because, memory systems often act as bottlenecks in terms of latency, capacity, and bandwidth.

“My work aims to address these issues while also highlighting the importance of resilient, secure, and efficient solutions.”

What are your future research plans?

My research group is currently investigating memory capacity issues for large-scale machine learning models, such as large language models (LLMs) and recommender systems. The overheads of serving and training these models are driven not only by GPUs but also by the architecture of their memory systems.

Additionally, we are exploring industry-friendly and practical solutions to mitigate Rowhammer and investigating security vulnerabilities beyond Rowhammer. Memory systems at scale also present sustainability challenges, and we are currently exploring strategies to address these from both over-provisioning and resilience standpoints.

Learn more about Professor Nair’s research and publications.