Amogh Akshintala

I am a Research Scientist at Facebook Reality Labs in Seattle. We are building a new micro-kernel OS for next-gen AR/VR devices, and my team owns the RPC framework (IDL, code-generator, encoding and RPC libraries in target languages). As an ex-academic starting a new career in industry, I’m having a blast leveling up as a software engineer (something I neglected quite a bit during my Ph.D.). I’m fortunate to be able to participate and observe how a large team comes together to accomplish a singluar goal (to build the OS best suited for AR/VR). Join us: we’re looking for both industry hires, as well as PhD grads.

In a past life, I was a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science, UNC Chapel Hill. I’m extremely fortunate to have been advised by a number of amazing people throughout my Ph.D.: Don Porter (who leads the OSCAR lab at UNC), Chris Rossbach (at UT Austin and VMware Research Group), and Michael Ferdman (at Stony Brook University). My focus in grad school was on System Software (OS, File Systems, Compilers) and Computer Architecture (ISAs, accelerator interfaces, etc.), and my (unfinished) dissertation was on virtualization of GPUs and other API-controlled accelerators.

During the course of my PhD, I

• spent the first 2 years of my Ph.D. as the benchmark czar (performance engineering) for the BetrFS project.
• studied the distribution of x86 instructions in all the C/C++ binaries from the Ubuntu repositories, in the hope of drawing interesting insights to help design a subset ISA,
• built an LLVM backend for a GPU vISA (TGSI)
• co-designed an automate-able low-overhead virtualization scheme for specialized accelerators,
• thought about first-class abstractions for programmable accelerators,
• and in general had fun with heterogeneous compute.

I was involved with CSRTales, an effort spear-headed by Vijay Chidambaram to document and share the often-forgotten human-side of CS research.

About Me

I moved to the Seattle Metro in 2021, and absolutely love how beautiful this place is (even during the gray months).

Over the course of graduate school, I lived in or around Stony Brook, NY; Chapel Hill, NC; Austin, TX; and Palo Alto, CA. I followed my advisor to UNC when he moved to Chapel Hill in Fall 2016, from Stony Brook University where I spent 4 amazing years, both as an M.S., and a Ph.D. student. Before moving to the USA for graduate school, I lived in Bangalore, India for 9 years, where I attended a smattering of high schools, and earned a Bachelor of Engineering from BNMIT (VTU). Before that, I spent about 9 years in Singapore and Malaysia as a kid. I was born in India, and lived in Bangalore for the first 5 years of my life.

I’ve got a bad case of the travel bug — I’m on a plane almost every month (pre-pandemic; hope to get back to that again soon). I enjoy some amount of outdoor activity, especially in calm, less-trafficked places. I used to be an avid gamer, and fantasy/science-fiction reader, although I’ve done very little of either in the recent past.

I am an ordained Dudeist priest.