Skarlatos receives Intel’s 2024 Rising Star Faculty Award

Each year, the Intel Rising Star Faculty Award program selects early-career academic researchers leading technological advancements that demonstrate the potential to disrupt the industry. Dimitrios Skarlatos, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department, is among the eight award winners chosen for 2024 who are being recognized for their novel works in computer science, electrical engineering, and computer engineering.

The program recognizes academic community members who are doing exceptional work in the field with the hope to build long-term collaborative relationships with senior technical leaders at Intel. In addition, award recipients were chosen for their innovative teaching methods and efforts to increase participation of women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.

The research conducted by the selected faculty provides novel solutions to challenges spanning various topics, including artificial intelligence, computer architecture, quantum computing, manufacturing processing and packaging technology, security, and quantum photonics.

Dimitrios Skarlatos

Skarlatos bridges hardware and operating systems and delves into the core challenges of datacenter computing, addressing fundamental questions about scalability limitations, security vulnerabilities, and energy efficiency. His past work on memory management has tackled longstanding system design challenges at the interface of OS and hardware, which can severely impede server efficiency. His contributions at the algorithmic, OS, and hardware level have enabled highly efficient virtual memory and memory management for large-scale systems. These innovations have led to major gains in production data centers.

Skarlatos’ work further extends into the domain of security at the intersection of OS and hardware. He has uncovered vulnerabilities in the software-hardware interface and has designed comprehensive hardware and OS mechanisms to reduce the attack surface of operating systems. His work has been upstreamed into Linux, targeting containerized environments, and was later adopted by Android.

Looking ahead, Skarlatos is pioneering the design of OS and hardware extensions aimed at bridging the semantic gap in data-parallel hardware, such as GPUs. His approach shifts away from specialized runtimes and loosely integrated offload devices, all while ensuring robust security guarantees and maximized energy efficiency.