The abstract Research Group
abstract is the research group of Prof. Brandon Lucia in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. We do research at the intersection of computer architecture, computer systems, and programming languages, focused on improving the programmability, reliability, and efficiency of computing devices and systems. Our work cuts across the layers of the system stack, from the microarchitecture to the application, often touching on everything in between.
Brandon is also a co-founder of Efficient Computer, commercializing energy-minimal computer architecture research from the group. We release our code on GitHub.
Research
Our group does computer systems research spanning architecture, software systems, and programming languages. We are currently focused on energy-minimal and encrypted computer architectures, intermittent computing, efficient edge computing, and computer systems for emerging small form-factor satellites.
Architectures for Encrypted Computing
Algorithms and hardware acceleration that make privacy-preserving, encrypted offloading of computation practical for clients.
Energy-minimal Dataflow Architectures
Ultra-low-power programmable dataflow and CGRA architectures — RipTide, SNAFU, and MANIC — that bring general-purpose compute to milliwatt-scale devices.
The Intermittent System Stack
Defining the software and hardware system stack for batteryless devices that harvest energy from their environment and compute intermittently.
Efficient Edge Computing
System software and architectures that make parallel systems and graph analytics reliable and efficient, meeting the emerging need for processing at the edge.
Computational Space Systems
Orbital edge computing and batteryless computational nanosatellites, including Tartan-Artibeus-1, our chip-scale satellite launched in 2022.
Funding and Support
The work in our group is possible through extremely generous support from industry and government.
This work was supported in part by the CONIX Research Center, one of six centers in JUMP, a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARPA.