Maleen Abeydeera

Maleen Abeydeera

PhD Student

MIT CSAIL

Update: I have graduated from MIT in June 2021 and have joined Waymo as a software engineer.

Hi, I’m Maleen. I am interested in novel software/hardware techniques to accelerate computationally challenging applications. I build C++ simulators to validate architectural ideas, write RTL to estimate complexity, and build FPGA solutions to accelerate real-world applications.

At MIT, I work with Daniel Sanchez on the Swarm project, where we investigate how to use speculative execution to accelerate certain hard-to-parallelize applications such as shortest path computations and discrete event simulations. My most recent project, Chronos, shows that these ideas can be used to build FPGA accelerators that runs 5x faster than 40-threaded CPUs.

Before starting grad school, I did my undergrad at University or Moratuwa in Sri Lanka. For my thesis, I was part of a 4-person team that designed and built an FPGA accelerator for HEVC/H.265 video decoding. This work led to the founding of Paraqum Technologies, which provides FPGA-based acceleration solutions to clients in the Asia-Pacific region.

In addition, I did consulting work for Wave computing, helping write new benchmarks to validate their CGRA architecture, and I have also interned at Microsoft Research’s Brainwave project, a deep-learning accelerator for FPGAs.

I am looking to graduate in summer 2021, and is looking for full-time industry roles.

Resume

Interests

  • Performance Optimization
  • Hardware Acceleration
  • Computer Architecture

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, Expected June 2021

    MIT

  • BSc in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, 2013

    University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka