Biography
Mohammad Alian earned his B.S. in computer engineering from University of Tehran in 2013, his Masters in computer engineering from University of Wisconsin Madison in 2015, and his Ph.D. in computer engineering from University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 2020. His doctoral work focused on cross-stack, network-centric architectural design for next-generation data centers. After receiving his doctoral degree, Alian spent three years as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas and then joined the Cornell faculty in July 2024. From February of 2023 to August of 2023, Alian was on a sabbatical visit to Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.
Research Interests
The computation in future data centers will be distributed over a heterogenous array of processing elements, packaged modularly within a servers boundaries. The inter- and intra-server data movement will bottleneck such a computing landscape. The vision of Alian Research Group is to seamlessly integrate processor, memory, and network architecture through a co-design with operating systems, network software stack, and software libraries to minimize the data movement in future data centers.
Teaching Interests
Computer Architecture, Digital Logic Desing, Datacenter Architecture
Select Publications
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Derrick Quinn, Ezgi Yücel, Jinkwon Kim, José Martínez, Mohammad Alian, “LongSight: Compute-Enabled Memory to Accelerate Large-Context LLMs via Sparse Attention,” International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) 2025
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Derrick Quinn, Ezgi Yücel, Martin Prammer, Zhenxing Fan, Kevin Skadron, Jignesh Patel, José Martínez, Mohammad Alian, “DReX: Accurate and Scalable Dense Retrieval Acceleration via Algorithmic-Hardware Codesign,” International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 2025
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Derrick Quinn, Mohammad Nouri, Neel Patel, Alireza Salimi, Sukhan Lee, Hamed Zamani, and Mohammad Alian, “Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Generation,” International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2025
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Neel Patel, Amin Mamandipoor, Derrick Quinn, and Mohammad Alian, “XFM: Accelerated Software-Defined Far Memory,” International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) 2023
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Mohammad Alian, Seung Won Min, Hadi Asgharimoghaddam, Ashutosh Dhar, Dong Kai Wang, Thomas Roewer, Adam McPadden, Oliver OHalloran, Deming Chen, Jinjun Xiong, Daehoon Kim, Wen-mei Hwu, and Nam Sung Kim, “Application-transparent near-memory processing architecture with memory vhannel network,” International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) 2018
Select Awards and Honors
- Early CAREER Award, National Science Foundation 2023
- Open Innovation Contest Runner Up Award 2022
- Best Paper Finalist, IISWC 2019
- Best Paper Finalist, MICRO 2018
- Honorable Mention, IEEE MICRO 2018
- Best Paper Finalist, HPCA 2017
- Best Paper Finalist, ISPASS 2017
Education
- B.Sc., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran 2013
- M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin Madison 2015
- Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2020