Prof. Dr. Onur Mutlu

Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously held the William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current broader research interests are in computer architecture, computing systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. He is especially interested in interactions across domains and between applications, system software, compilers, and microarchitecture, with a major current focus on memory and storage systems, bioinformatics, and biologically-inspired computation paradigms. He leads the SAFARI Research Group (https://safari.ethz.ch/).

A variety of techniques he and his group discovered and invented over the years (e.g., the RowHammer phenomenon in DRAM memory and its various solutions, new insights on DRAM and NAND flash memory errors, runahead execution, QoS-aware memory controllers, intelligent prefetcher designs, non-volatile memory and hybrid memory system designs, new memory system architectures, new GPU thread schedulers, and various flash memory signal processing and lifetime management mechanisms) have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory/storage systems, including systems designed by Apple, Hi-Silicon, Huawei, Intel, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung, Sun Microsystems.

He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin (2006) and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His industrial experience spans starting the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and various product and research positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware and Google.

He was named an ACM Fellow for “contributions to computer architecture research, especially in memory systems” and an IEEE Fellow for “contributions to computer architecture research and practice.” He was elected as a member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea) due to his “outstanding achievements as a researcher.” He received the 2024 IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing, 2023 Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award, 2023 Huawei OlympusMons Award for Storage Systems Research, 2022 Google Security and Privacy Research Award, 2022 Persistent Impact Prize of the Non-Volatile Memories Workshop, 2021 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, 2021 IEEE High Performance Computer Architecture Symposium Test of Time Award, 2020 IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award for “innovative and impactful contributions to computer memory systems,” the 2019 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award “for innovative contributions in efficient and secure DRAM systems,” the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Young Computer Architect Award, the inaugural Intel Early Career Faculty Award, CMU College of Engineering George Tallman Ladd Research Award, US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, faculty partnership awards from various companies (including Alibaba, AMD, ASML, Facebook, Google, Hi-Silicon, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, VMware), Hall of Fame Recognitions from all four top computer architecture conferences (ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, ASPLOS),  and a healthy number of best paper and "Top Pick" paper recognitions at various computer systems, architecture, and hardware security venues, including many papers recognized as IEEE Micro’s Top Picks in Computer Architecture and the RowHammer paper as IEEE TCAD’s Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security. 

He has co-authored a healthy number of top conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters, which have been widely recognized in both academia and industry. His computer architecture, memory systems, and digital design course lectures and materials, at Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD levels, are freely available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/onurmutlulectures), and his research group makes a wide variety of software and hardware artifacts freely available online (https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI). For more information, please see his webpage at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.